"Calling this a “wave” or even a “spike” is accurate in retrospect, but it doesn’t capture the climate for those who lived through it. We call a pattern a wave because we know it will eventually crest and collapse. It is the return to normalcy that gives a trend the shape of a spike. But for people who were living through this time, there was no reason to believe that they would see the other side of the wave. If, like Donald Trump, you were 44 in 1990, crime had risen in every decade of your life. High crime would have felt like the new normal. If you really want to get an idea of what this era felt like, watch a bunch of ’80s and ’90s science fiction, fantasy, and horror movies. No, really...
In 1984, Ghostbusters depicted a New York whose citizenry was literally haunted by evil spirits. In the trashy horror movie C.H.U.D. (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers), homeless people live in the sewers, infected by toxic waste and sustaining on unsuspecting New Yorkers they’ve dragged underground to feed on. “A recent article in a New York newspaper reported that there were large colonies of people living under the city,” the movie’s marketing went. “The paper is incorrect. What is living under the city is not human.” The tagline warned, “They’re not staying down there, anymore.” A couple years prior, in the real-life New York of 1982, Trump was attempting to evict the tenants of a rent-controlled apartment that he owned on Central Park South, so he could tear down the building and build new luxury apartments. When a handful of tenants wouldn’t budge, Trump offered the empty apartments to the City of New York as housing for the homeless. He wasn’t being benevolent: He was trying to use the prospect of living next to the homeless to drive out the remaining tenants. The city, wisely, declined...
This bleak vision of the two New York Cities — one wealthy and mostly white, the other poor, and mostly black and brown — reflected the anxiety of the class divide in the city. Even as crime was spiking, rents were rising. The city’s economy began to recover and white people began returning to midtown. In fact, the reason that Trump’s castle was never built is that the firm that owned the land decided it could make even more money selling it to another developer...
But if you listen to Donald Trump, it’s the late ’80s again. “The murder rate,” Trump declared at his campaign rallies, “it’s the worst, the highest it’s been in 45 years. Nobody talks about that — nobody talks about that.” Nobody talks about this mostly because it isn’t true. In fact, it’s nearly the opposite of true. In 2015, the murder rate in NYC did increase by about 10 percent, the highest one-year increase in about 25 years. Though the numbers haven’t officially been released for 2016, crime is projected to have increased again. But the murder rate in 2015 was still near the historic lows of past years."
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