Over Labor Day weekend, New York saw behavior that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when I was a New York City Police Department counterterrorism analyst.

After the terror organization Hamas executed six hostages, including one American — thousands marched in support of the terrorists.

From behind keffiyehs, they disrupted the Labor Day Parade, flying the flags of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and called for more violence against Americans and Jews. And yet they face no social condemnation. 

White House spokesman Andrew Bates called this pro-terror spectacle “especially heinous,” and urged “all Americans to come together and stand against antisemitism and against the sickening hate and evil that Hamas represents.”

His appeal echoed that of Mayor Adams, who, in June urged: “Any New Yorker who stands for peace cannot stand next to those waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags.”

But now, unlike after Sept. 11, 2001 and the decade that followed, New Yorkers are not coming together to condemn antisocial behavior — whether it’s blasting music on city buses, consuming illicit drugs in front of our children  or championing terrorists who butcher innocent Americans.

We have given up so much of our control of public spaces over the past few years, that we paved the way for them to be overrun — even by those calling for the very destruction of our society.

As a lifelong Upper West Sider, this disintegration in social control in recent years has been palpable.

Indeed, I was concerned by the disappearance of public trust way before last October’s rape-massacre of Israelis was brazenly celebrated with violence against Jews in Times Square.

Like two-thirds of polled New Yorkers, I no longer think my neighborhood’s safety is excellent or even good — because I’m not confident my fellow citizens are looking out for me. 

Criminologists have long considered social control to be a measure of citizens’ trust in each other and their willingness to intervene when they perceive a problem.

Harvard’s Robert Sampson described these as a metric of “collective efficacy”; associated insights from George Kelling and sociologist James Q. Wilson led to a focus on quality-of-life policing in the 1990s, which radically improved American cities’ norms of behavior. 

The Upper West Side improved radically as I grew up because more laws against low-level offending were enforced: broken windshield glass stopped littering Riverside Drive, syringes disappeared from park lawns and prostitutes vanished from Amsterdam Avenue.

As a community, our “collective efficacy” rose, such that we could maintain these social norms without constant interventions by the criminal justice system.

But the political backlash against policing and incarceration that began around 2014 — and exploded during the #blacklivesmatter protests of 2020 — destroyed New York communities’ collective efficacy. We need formal control in order to enable informal control.

Without authorized use of force — police, courts and prisons — individuals become more tentative about trusting others or about the inherent physical risks in intervening in apparent problems.

Indeed, when my husband recently demanded a woman not smoke crack in a crowded subway car next to our kids, she did it anyway — and no one “came together” to stop her.

Central to this hesitance is that New York stopped prosecuting crimes.

Last year, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office arraigned over 63% fewer cases than a decade prior: that is 62,435 fewer prosecutions. And whereas Manhattan used to convict almost two-thirds of those offenders, now less than a third are convicted — despite the overall lower caseload.

Barely a quarter of misdemeanors, encompassing many street disorder crimes, now result in convictions. Even more indicative of quality-of-life abandonment, Manhattan went from 7,500 convictions for violations and infractions in 2013, to just 47 last year: a conviction rate drop from 63% to 14%.

The extreme “Free Palestine” movement has brilliantly exploited our weakened social norms, adopting tactics — like masking — that universally undermine trust.

Similarly, chanting barely coded threats to wipe Jews off the map or drowning out civic life with loud drumming all signal that these demonstrators don’t care about earning your trust.

Just as more and more New Yorkers don’t care about smoking in your train car or stealing from your supermarket.

Most illustrative are agitators’ acts of physical intimidation, from tackling a janitor at Columbia to killing a counter-protestor with a megaphone-blow.

Appropriating “zones” within public spaces is itself a physical aggression, intentionally telegraphing risk to anyone who dares exercise their right to passage across a college campus or across a bridge.

Demonstrators order reporters and passersby not to speak to them, not to film them, not to ask them any questions about what they believe or what they are advocating.

And this type of disorder will almost inevitably spread beyond the current protest moment. 

New Yorkers, once famous for our confrontational style of conflict resolution, are meekly tolerating aggression and averting our eyes from its impact on our communities.

To revive our collective efficacy, we need to amend the policies and practices that gutted our criminal justice system. And we need to stand up for the social norms that we miss and make our cities cohesive.

Hannah E. Meyers is a fellow and director of policing and public safety for the Manhattan Institute.