It’s tempting for New York City to greet last week’s Sixth Avenue killing of UnitedHealthcare chief Brian Thompson with macabre relief: It’s never good to have someone fatally shot on the street, but at least this crime wasn’t yet another “random” attack.
The poor guy, whether for a personal, business or ideological reason, could have been targeted anywhere.
Wrong: Put in context, it’s yet another blow for a fragile Gotham.
Yes, New York, as a high-profile global magnet for superstars and business and political leaders, has always had more than its fair share of assassinations: John Lennon, Meir Kahane.
But each such incident must be seen in its context. Is a particular assassination just another bullet point of lawlessness in a dangerous, unpleasant city, or is it an aberration in an otherwise safe, pleasant city?
When Lennon was killed, in 1980, Gotham had 1,814 murders; as for broader felonies, the New York Times called it “the worst year of crime in New York City history.”
In 1990, when Kahane was killed, the city had gotten even worse: 527,257 felonies, including 2,262 murders. Nobody was safe, so why should important people be any different?
After 1990, crime, including murder, steadily fell until 2019.
Now, Thompson’s sidewalk murder in the heart of Midtown punctuates nearly five years of rising crime and disorder.
After nearly three decades of sure decline, murder rose 53% between 2019 and 2021, the highest such rise in such a short time on record. Murder is still 14% above 2019 levels, and there’s no sign we’ll get back there anytime soon. Felonies are 30% higher than in 2019.
And random chaos reigns: Thompson’s killing came barely two weeks after Ramon Rivera, sprung on no-bail supervised release on a recent theft charge, after having just served a months-long sentence in Rikers for repeat thefts and burglaries, stabbed three stangers to death across core Manhattan.
And Thompson’s killing came the day before one teenage migrant fatally stabbed another, also in core Manhattan — a five-minute walk from City Hall Park, a place generally teeming with armed officers.
Murder in the southern half of Manhattan, including Midtown and downtown, with 23 killings so far this year, is 80% higher than the average annual total between 2015 and 2019.
In the 2010s, with crime steadily falling and the city’s streets feeling generally safe, the fact that a masked man could shoot an executive right in front of a marquee Midtown hotel as the sun is rising might have been dismissed as an aberration.
Plus, the perpetrator was masked. Until early 2020, the video of a masked perpetrator would have seemed jarring, out of place in New York.
Now, men on mopeds and e-bikes whiz by us fully masked every day — and not because of the weather or COVID.
Even the sight of a fully masked man lurking in the alley between Sixth and Seventh avenues does not arouse suspicion, at least no more than we’ve all learned to walk around with over the past half-decade.
There’s another reason why the Thompson killing is a bad sign for New York: The open-air execution of a top executive has spurred the finance and business world to beef up security.
They don’t know yet if the Thompson killing is a one-off, or the start of a terror campaign against CEOs.
Tight security is not easy in a dense city like New York. Yes, hotel conferences can scan attendees’ badges, and more executives can travel around in SUVs with blacked-out windows straight into hotel and business garages.
But this type of security isn’t ironclad: Most hotels are still relatively open spaces, allowing for people to meet in lobbies and restaurants, and many older office buildings and private residences don’t have door-to-door garage access.
Nor is this type of security convenient: There’s a reason why the myth used to be that millionaires and paupers alike ride the subway.
If the level of security you need dictates that you never enter a crowded, or even uncrowded, space with any strangers — that you literally cannot cross the street from one hotel sidewalk to another without risking your life — then New York is not the place for you.
Your business is better off setting up shop, or holding conferences, on a car-based suburban campus where you can easily control and monitor access.
That’s not New York’s fault, just as 9/11, which caused businesses to briefly rethink skyscraper life, was not New York’s fault.
But failing to control things within our control — the general level of crime and disorder — means that the things we can’t control have a worse impact: It’s not one thing or another, but all of them at once.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
