If a self-evident right falls in a New York City Street and no one hears it, does it still exist? Amen, it does! You have every right to walk your neighborhood streets without vigilantly shifting your head from either side, rotating your body backwards and forward, scanning the terrain for someone who is perched ready to assault, maim, rape, rob – or- if with a little leniency, spit in your face, ask for a few dollars and curse loud threats.
We The People, must protect our right to safety with the same force we use to protect our loved ones and our possessions. The first line of defense in protecting our safety is maintaining a deep, unyielding belief that our God given safety is nothing to apologize for or feel any shame in having. (Afterall, doesn’t general public safety fall under the greater umbrella of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?)There is a trend where otherwise good, law-abiding people forfeit their baseline expectation of safety. This trend is followed whenever someone describes a crime as if it was a by-product of the economy or normal and as much part of urban life as a corner bodega.
In urban areas especially, walking is the conduit for life. The walk to the corner coffee shop means more than the purchase of a Styrofoam cup of hot caffeine and warm milk. The walk to the corner coffee shop is a testament of being safe to enjoy freedom of movement and freedom of commerce. The early morning Saturday coffee purchase is a real-life duet performed by cashier and customer in the ongoing play of free market enterprise best performed on safe platforms of our American streets. Safe, simple, sweet store rituals are our right – no matter who spouts off and deems these rituals despised targets.
What will it take for regular people (those without personal bodyguards 24/7) to walk in peace with the exact degree of safety experienced in New York from the middle of 1994 to the end of around 2018? We must first identify all aspects of the problem.
Permissible Crime
Some people think we regular people do not deserve basic, baseline freedom. To some, our right to safety in and of itself is a true crime and partaking in liberty and living our lives is also a crime. Within this Blame the Victim logic, believers of safety and partakers of liberty are the true criminals. Merely engaging in the morning routine of rushing out the door, walking to drop off the laundry, then walking to work - followed by leaving work, stopping at a happy hour to catch up with friends, before buying produce from the corner stand enroute to one’s coveted building door, lobby, elevator and finally kicking shoes off in the foyer, is an offense. The parental dinnertime pitch of how throwing unwanted food away hurts the starving children in China is recycled and revised and reframed into a whine of how moving unafraid from Point A to Point B in safe surroundings keeps us awful regular Americans naïve and insufficiently sympathetic to those who live in dangerous environments. Peer pressure mounts to prompt us to harbor ill thoughts about our way of life – as if, by picking up a present for a friend or buying apples, we are committing acts on par with pillaging the shelves of a CVS, every time we cross the street – our street – paid for with our efforts – we are thieves.
Within an arena of abundant random street violence, we are charged with the delicate balance of keeping our self-evident right alive and active – while employing all the now necessary precautions to maintain our own physical safety.