Up in Arms Over Crime

A Saturday afternoon three days before Christmas. A dingy, noisy subway train rolls under Greenwich Village and approaches the World Trade Center. Five shots ring out in eight seconds. Four black youths lie wounded. Bernhard Goetz becomes a legend.

Amid an outpouring of praise for the man who refused to be mugged, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau takes the case to a grand jury. The panel of 23 New Yorkers indicts Goetz only for illegal possession of handguns. Much of the city applauds. So does much of the nation. A Media General-Associated Press poll discloses that 47% of Americans approve of what Goetz did, 36% prudently say that they do not know enough of the details to form a judgment, and only 17% feel that Goetz was wrong in shooting the teenagers.

But soon second thoughts set in. The youths had asked Goetz for $5, but were they really about to harm him? Two carried screwdrivers, but two were not armed. Why did Goetz, by his own account, bend over one slumped youth and say, "You seem to be doing all right. Here's another," and then fire a shot that may have crippled the youth for life? And if Goetz was a shy, retiring person as he claimed, why was he parading around town with reporters, making pronouncements on the need for law-and-order?

As public support for Goetz wavers, Morgenthau resubmits the case to a second grand jury. After deliberating last week, this grand jury throws the book at Goetz, charging him with four counts of attempted murder, four counts of assault, one count of reckless endangerment of other passengers in the subway car and one count of criminal possession of a weapon.

The story of Bernhard Goetz had taken an unexpected turn, but it still hit the same raw nerve in the American psyche. Despite his personal peculiarities (see following story), Goetz was to some extent an Everyman: even people who deplored what he did felt they could understand why he did it. "I was acting out of goddam fear," Goetz wrote in a first-person newspaper story. That fear is shared by millions of Americans whose pulses quicken at the sound of footsteps following on dark city sidewalks, who cross to the opposite side of the street when young toughs loiter ahead, who endure the impersonal intimacy of jammed buses and nervously eye what Columbia Criminologist Peter Read calls "the familiar stranger."

Fear. Many experts contend that it has always exceeded the actual danger posed by street criminals bent on violence. But there is no question that fear of crime is a dominant fact of urban life and a growing blight on suburbia as well. A new report by the Eisenhower Foundation, a group of academics who study crime, found that "the level of fear of crime remains at least as high" in the U.S. as in one of the worst previous periods, the 1960s. Atlanta Psychiatrist Alfred Messer, who calls the 1980s "the decade of the criminal," argues that the prevalence of violent crime makes people feel "helpless." He contends that Goetz "symbolically accomplished what we couldn't do and were taught not to do. He is seen as striking a blow for all of us."