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A New Shock to the System

Posted 12/13/19

“New York Is Unnerved By Student’s Killing,” blared the headline in the Dec. 13 New York Times, referring to the fatal stabbing in Morningside Park two days earlier of Tessa Majors, an 18-year-old student at nearby Barnard College.

The crime, apparently growing out of a robbery, occurred in the early evening, not a time when some residents might question walking through a park after dark. That is a measure of how much safer the city has become over the past quarter-century: the fear of gangs and other dangers lurking in parks has diminished from what existed in an era when for several years starting in the late 1980s, murders climbed near and then above 2,000.

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