World View and the
Crime-Victim
Narrative
New York City occupies a unique place in America’s popular culture, as well as in its folklore.1 It is constantly depicted as a dangerous, crime-filled metropolis in both movies and popular television detective programs. In Death Wish, a Hollywood film that has received considerable audience attention, Charles Bronson portrays a man who decides to avenge single-handedly the deaths of his wife and daughter, who were viciously attacked in their Manhattan apartment by a group of delinquents. Bronson’s character stalks Central Park and Manhattan streets after dark, brazenly attacking street thugs before (he assumes) they attack him or other New Yorkers. His vendetta against urban crime brings cheers of support from movie audiences.2 This film and its two sequels,Death Wish II and Death Wish III, can be added to a score of others that use New York as their backdrop to emphasize urban crime. Television police detective shows, which also have a wide national audience, frequently use New York City as their setting. Programs such as “Kojak,” “Barney Miller,” “Cagney and Lacey,” and “The Equalizer” provide American viewers with a weekly dose of the city’s darker side.
This popular-culture depiction of crime, violence, and victimization as integral to daily life in New York City is reinforced in several examples of folklore that have had a broad national currency. Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, for example, reports several versions of an urban legend about baseball player Reggie Jackson, who meets up with two elderly women tourists in a New York City elevator. Jackson is in the elevator with his pet dog and shouts at the animal to sit. Immediately, the women sit down on the elevator floor. Jackson apologizes to the women, explaining that he was speaking to his pet. Once the nervous women recover, they ask Jackson for suggestions about dining out, and decide to go to the restaurant he recommends. When they try to pay their bill, they discover that the man in the elevator, who they come to learn is the famous baseball star, has paid it.3 While the legend reaffirms Jackson’s superstar status, it also hints at the tourists’ fear of crime and society’s racist attitudes. An important, but neglected, aspect of the discussion of this legend is its setting: New York City is invariably used as the backdrop.4 Because New York City is consistently perceived as a crime capital, the locale is rarely scrutinized. Nevertheless, its mere mention lends believability to the depicted event. Would the legend have the same effect if the alleged incident happened in Cleveland or Altuna?
Some folkloric examples about New York City or depictions of New Yorkers involve humor. For example, during the popular lightbulb joke cycle several years ago, one joke was particularly striking in its presentation of New Yorkers. In this joke, one New Yorker asks another, “How many New Yorkers does it take to change a lightbulb?” The reply? “What’s it to ya?” This response presents the New Yorker as someone unwilling to divulge even the simplest information, to the point of being cautiously rude and hostile. This joke, however, was also told by informants, New Yorkers among them. Some acknowledged with a bit of pride that New Yorkers had a recognizable persona, however unlikeable. By transmitting the joke, they too acknowledged the stereotype of New Yorkers as rude and uncivil. On the other hand, New York City humor projected by New Yorkers reveals a certain tenacity and strength based on what one commentator calls “a survival instinct,” which he claims is unexhibited elsewhere and is probably misunderstood by those not living in New York City.5 As mentioned earlier, the joke about carrying extra money for muggers, or the quips told at the tea previously described serve as examples of this cynical, tenacious humor.
It was the Bernhard Goetz incident that reinforced the image of New York City as a crime capital. On December 22, 1984, Goetz, a bespectacled, owlish-looking white male who worked as an electronics engineer, took a subway ride that significantly changed his life. Dubbed “Death Wish Killer” or the “Subway Vigilante” by the city’s sensationalistic media, Goetz became a controversial, though short-lived, urban folk hero. On the subway that night, he had whipped out a revolver from his waistband and shot four black teenagers who approached him with sharpened screwdrivers and demanded five dollars for video games, “I’ve got five dollars for each one of you,” replied Goetz as he aimed his revolver at the youths.
To many New Yorkers, Goetz became a cause célèbre. Stories about him headlined newspapers everywhere. Even T-shirts bearing his likeness were sold on Manhattan street corners. Goetz—as the victim who struck back—acted atypically when compared to the characters described in these crime-victim stories. Goetz projected the fears and frustrations of all crime victims and potential victims, and reinforced a well-known image of New York City. Furthermore, the event solidified New York as the symbol of the most violent and dangerous American city in the world’s imagination.6
Certainly, the international attention garnered by Goetz and the sensationalism by the media made the incident as powerful as the 1964 Genovese murder. But in the Goetz case, the interest in this urban figure reached its peak when he was an anonymous, mysterious fugitive from the law turning himself in at a police station in New Hampshire. As the facts of the case were revealed to the public and Goetz’s personality and past experiences were scrutinized, he began to lose his supporters.7 As in the common crime-victim experiences cited in these stories, the Goetz incident is another example onto which the fears of the city’s people were projected: only his case was more dramatic. Another difference between the Goetz case and the crime-victim stories discussed here is the refusal to submit to an offender’s power. Goetz stirred up the specter of revenge and rage so strongly desired by many victims. Noted psychiatrist Willard Gaylin writes in The Rage Within: Anger in Modern Life:
Most of us endure our frustrations and humiliations without resorting to animal attack. We accept the deprivation without attempting to rectify it by physically attacking either the agent of our deprivation or the fortuitously privileged. The fact that others do not behave in this way is particularly outraging. We are infuriated because we are aware of precisely the same impulses within ourselves which we do not indulge. . . . We are in a rage—those of us who occupy and must use the city streets, because we are aware of our own “right” to feel violent . . . which our self-discipline keeps us from acting out.8
Undoubtedly, the Goetz case is the most celebrated mugging case in recent urban history. The possibility that Goetz’s situation, the confrontation on a subway, could happen to any New Yorker is obvious. It was the aspect of revenge, the issue of self-defense, and the possession of an illegal handgun that made his case different from others. The case illustrated the difference between taking action, as Bernhard Goetz did, and empathizing with those we identify with, such as Bronson’s Death Wish character. Nevertheless, the incident itself, which occurred on a New York City subway and was told around the world, reinforced the belief that New York City is indeed a city of violence. Like the crime-victim stories presented here, the Goetz case gave people a vehicle to project their fantasies of revenge against young delinquents who often escape the law. But the fantasies were short-lived once New Yorkers realized that Goetz had overstepped the line demarking appropriate behavior. His status quickly toppled; suddenly, he was portrayed by the media as a lonely eccentric bent on a one-man crusade to eradicate urban crime. As one New Yorker mentioned to me shortly after the incident, “Not only do we have to watch out for muggers like those kids, now we have to watch out for nuts like Goetz!”9
In addition to reevaluating the role that crime plays in urban life, the Goetz incident forced other issues: it addressed the question of the quality of life found in an urban setting. Much has been written about the urban scene; its advantages and disadvantages have been scrutinized by sociologists, psychologists, historians, and other culture specialists. The indigenously American cultural theme, that rural life is preferable to urban life, has been one of our strongest cultural myths, pervading our literature, cultural arts, politics, even folklore. More common traits of urban life emphasized by sociologists decades ago, such as alienation, and conservation of energy to prevent psychic overload, are currently being reevaluated. Certain features about city life—for example, the availability of services, the cultural diversity, the stimulating environment, the strong secondary social networks—are regarded today as positive features and even healthy aspects of urban living.10
The middle-class New Yorkers I spoke to were consistent in presenting two basic assumptions about living in New York City. These assumptions are the building blocks that make up their urban world view and provide them with “a vision for understanding” the world around them.11 First, most informants contended that New York is the most dangerous city in the country. They believed that anyone can be a crime victim; no one is immune. Their stories were the testimony to prove this contention.
In addition to seeing it as the major crime city, informants believed New York to be an urban jungle where the social order is continually being disrupted and where dehumanization is a constant state. The crime-victim narrative presents one aspect of urban living. Because of the nature of the topic itself, the world view projected is, to a large degree, fatalistic. The narratives imply that good will towards others in the urban environment is limited, if it exists at all. The urban scene in these stories is full of criminals (ready to maim, murder, rape, and steal), apathetic fellow citizens, and ineffectual police. Despite the melting-pot image commonly associated with New York City, these stories engender a world view which suggests that heterogeneity breeds racism, intolerance, suspicion, and self-denigration. Indeed, in some stories, the teller makes it seem that the victim deserves his fate.
But as there are both negative and positive aspects of urban life, the cynical world view projected by these stories does not present a completely balanced picture. For if New York City were as horrible as informants presented it, it would be an intolerable place to live. Thus, New Yorkers acknowledge the city’s cultural and cosmopolitan stature. Native informants are always aware of the city’s distinction as a cultural mecca. While the informants reveal a dangerous world within the personal-experience stories they tell about crime, they balance that cynical world view with a positive, optimistic view of New York City: thus, they could comfortably and without irony call it “the capital of the nation.” To them, New York City is a place where any whim can be satisfied at any time.
New Yorkers I spoke with shared some views about their city similar to ones commonly held by many of the over 20 million tourists who visit New York annually. Gerald Handel, in analyzing tourists’ expectations of New York City, discovered that visitors not only expect New Yorkers to be unfriendly, but they also feel, as tourists, that they need to be constantly vigilant about crime. Handel notes, “expectations of crime are prominent in the image that visitors had of New York prior to visiting. . . . When asked how New York is different from what they expected, they often reply that there is less crime than they expected or ’I haven’t been mugged yet.’ ”12 One story collected from the sister of a tourist corroborates Handel’s findings:
This happened to my younger brother’s sister-in-law’s husband. My brother got married in ’65. This must have been about ’72. All the years between my brother’s wedding, his wife’s sister-in-law Alice wanted to come to New York. She wanted to come to New York so bad. And every time she would say something to Sal [her husband], he would say, “Why do you want to go to New York City? You’ll just get shot.” And that was his stock answer, “You’ll just get shot.” Finally, Alice persuaded Sal to come to New York. So they packed up the kids, got in the car, and started driving. They drove the 475 miles down from upstate New York onto the West Side Highway. And as they passed the Dyckman Street exit, Sal got shot! . . . This was the time when there was a lot of sniper work going on the Upper West Side. And they deduced that it was a BB. It wasn’t heavy action. Someone was fooling around with a rifle and just let go with a shot, and it was almost spent, but it still had enough force. . . . He was hit just below the jawbone. It lodged under his jawbone and had to be removed. So Alice spent the week in New York with my parents, and Sal spent the week in St. Clare’s Hospital. (M-89)
Sal’s experience, which no doubt reinforced his belief that New York City is a dangerous place, was narrated by his sister-in-law, Barbara Fenwick, a native. Sal’s belief that people are in constant jeopardy while in New York City underscores a vision of urban life that is implicit in many of the crime-victim stories.
As Sal’s story attests, in the world of the crime-victim narrative, there is little regard for the value of human life. The fear that one can unexpectedly come face to face with death infuses these stories with a sense of shock. What informants fear and despise in equal measure is the ubiquity of both gratuitous violence and harm inflicted by offenders without conscience. As gleaned from these stories, offenders act aggressively in situations and care little for the victim’s life. Informants rally against this amorality. Of all the narratives collected for this study, the following one, told to me by Toby Wolf, age sixty, of Brooklyn, reveals most horrifically this disregard for human life:
This happened about four or five years ago to my cousins. They came back from New York City [to Brooklyn from Manhattan]. It was probably a Saturday night. They parked around the corner from a restaurant. They were thirsty and wanted a drink. Just an ice cream or something like that. They get out of the car, I guess it must have been two blacks. They made my cousins—the man lay down on the floor, and they pulled out his pockets. Took all the keys, wallet, everything. His wife had to give her pocketbook and everything like that.
About three months ago, a friend of theirs who knew the story and knew that he shouldn’t resist. . . . They were coming home. I guess to their own house. He was walking down the street, and a colored man pulls out a gun. The wife gives him her pocketbook. The husband remembers about my cousin emptying his pockets. So, he put his hand in his pocket to take out his wallet, and they was standing there with the gun in his stomach. And as the man saw him stick his hand in this pocket, he shot him through the stomach. He killed him. He didn’t die immediately. He was in the hospital, and then he died. (M-26)
When Toby Wolf told the story, she was visibly shaken; her voice quivered, and its shrill tone convincingly disclosed her anguish and frustration about both incidents, particularly the senseless death of her cousins’ friends. When she came to the second part of the story, the second mugging, she said emphatically, with a sense of determination and anger, that the friend “knew that he shouldn’t resist.” That the man followed the rules by starting to hand over his wallet to the mugger, and that his submissive actions were misinterpreted by an impulsive mugger, who killed him, made the event and the story more shocking and frightening. Not only does the story present the second victim’s compliance to avoid harm, but the victim’s action, reaching into his pocket for his money, seemed to the audience to be an appropriate way for him to have dealt with such a perilous situation. It seems, too, that in Wolf’s telling, the first victimization pales in comparison to the second. In Wolf’s narrative, however, it is clear how such a dramatic tale imparts street smarts to future victims. That the lesson fails in this particular case is an unusual enough circumstance for it to serve as the compelling dramatic point of the tale.
One aspect of the world view that informants present in these stories deals with the portrayal of violence. Offenders were presented as thriving on gratuitous violence, which was both disturbing and incomprehensible to many informants. The short narrative below is one of many examples:
A friend of mine who is a woman in her late fifties . . . was in the elevator and got caught in the elevator with some man that walked in at the last minute, and [he] beat her up very badly. He didn’t want anything. He just came in to do as much damage as he could. (M-30)
Other stories previously mentioned, including the story about the young man who was murdered at a stoplight, and the one about the woman who was murdered and dismembered by the elevator operator, exemplify a world where criminal violence is both unpredictable and unacceptable, where the social order seems to be continually disrupted by violence, and where victims and potential victims believe themselves to be without protection or recourse.
In these stories, the urban world is presented as a world without emotion, remorse, or conscience, especially in view of the offender’s actions. “He didn’t want anything. He just came in to do as much damage as he could,” a comment culled from the last story, represents informants’ typical opinions of offenders. This lack of conscience, particularly in juvenile offenders, has been discussed by Charles E. Silberman in his exhaustive study on criminal violence. He writes, “In the past, juveniles who exploded in violence tended to feel considerable guilt or remorse afterwards; the new criminals have been so brutalized in their own upbringing that they seem incapable of viewing their victims as fellow human beings, or of realizing that they have killed another person.”13 It is not only this lack of emotion or the display of violence that informants deplore; they find the offender’s complete disregard for fellow humans incomprehensible. Some informants, however, seem to have become hardened by a lack of concern towards victims.
Urbanites try to come to some understanding of these events. The very act of telling these stories is an important way for narrators to work out a meaning for them. Stories help New Yorkers and others attempt to understand how violence and urban crime affect them and others in their social network, and to allow them a chance to work out a meaning for these extraordinary events in a collaborative way.
In many cases, when a narrator tells the story of another victim, he or she is using the victim’s experiences to devise meaning for him- or herself. For example, when Toby Wolf told the story previously cited, she was trying to understand in her anguish how such an awful event could have occurred; and like other narrators and victims, she could find no satisfactory answer.
The use of these crime-victim stories vis à vis the world view they present is related to the work of Richard Sennett. In his work on social identity and city life, Sennett postulates how adolescents derive meaning from the experiences of others and, as a result, isolate themselves from experience in general. He writes,
By imagining the meaning of a class of experiences in advance or apart from living them, a young person is freed from having to go through the experience itself to understand its meaning. He makes up the meaning in isolation. . . . If projection of the meaning of experience does work as a stable substitute, then the young person has actually acquired a powerful weapon to prevent any exposure of himself; in other words, he has learned how to insulate himself in advance from experiences that might portend dislocation and disorder.14
Sennett continues by saying that an adolescent can then create “a purified picture of his own identity,” and by doing so can eradicate from his world view “disorder and painful disruption from conscious consideration.”15
In other words, if one hears the story of a victim, one can determine what meaning that experience holds without being victimized; knowing about victimization thus permits isolation. For that reason, it is understandable why some, though few, informants I spoke to seemed unaffected by crime-victim events. More important, this premise shows how crime-victim stories function as a mechanism whereby one learns about a specific type of unpleasant (to say the least) urban experience. As a result of this isolation, urbanites need not take responsibility for finding solutions for reducing the urban crime rate, such as reporting an incident to the police or joining a neighborhood crime-watch patrol.
In some ways, the urbanites I spoke with acted similarly to Sennett’s adolescents. By assuming that the social order is continually being disrupted by crime, city dwellers can use the experiences revealed in the stories to project order and meaning onto the world. As a result, it then is axiomatic that one cannot ride the subway without fear, or feel safe walking down a dimly lit street at night, or leave one’s home even for a few minutes without fear of burglary:
Well, I got robbed in my apartment last summer. . . . It was in a very nice Hispanic neighborhood. And there were welfare people living next door. But my building was really nice; mostly actors and students. And it was totally white, too. I don’t know if that makes a difference, but there had been a rash of robberies that month. I went out for about twenty minutes and I came back, and the door was unlocked. “And my small appliances and jewelry was gone. . . . I felt really rotten, and a little frightened. Pissed me off because it took the police an hour and a half to show up! . . .16
Because urbanites are so inundated by these crime-victim events, in both popular and folk culture, they find it difficult to account for and understand gratuitous violence.
Narrators projected a world characterized by an intolerance of others. This intolerance not only is based on features of urban life, such as density, incivility, or dehumanization; it is also based on prejudice. In the world of the crime-victim story, heterogeneity in New York breeds antagonism toward others. Most often, white narrators and listeners covertly express negative attitudes toward different ethnic and racial groups. One of the functions of the crime-victim narrative is to allow the teller to communicate such negative feelings by incorporating ethnic slurs or stereotypical portrayals of offenders and, occasionally, of victims.
Last year or two years ago on Passover, they [relatives] opened the door for Eliahu, and three gunmen walked in to rob them . . . they robbed them. They got everybody down, and one woman got to the bedroom . . . and she called the police. The police came while the gunmen were still there. . . . They had a shootout and killed the robber. . . . This was on Ninety-fifth Street and Amsterdam Avenue. We were kidding around at the dinner table, and my aunt said, “Don’t open the door for Eliahu because Puerto Ricans will come in!”17
Most often, crime-victim story narrators, the majority of whom are white, identify offenders by race. “A black kid, you know, did this,” or “Two blacks came up to me and put a knife in my side,” or “He was Hispanic, no shirt.” Narrators frequently use the word they to characterize groups: “They get their guns out too often” or “They just want to harm you” are ways in which evidence of prejudice appears in stories:
You remember when everybody was here. . . . and I saw the nigger in the window. . . . That’s why I never put my shade down, because I see who was stealing. I came over to here [to the kitchen window], and he [her husband] says to me, “Someday, you’re gonna get a gun to your head . . . if you don’t mind your own business. . . .” But I heard a noise. I says [to a black male outside of her window], “Hey, what are you doin’ out in the window over there?” . . . With the cap and the sneakers. Big nigger! He jumped from the window on to the top of the roof . . . [then] he goes up the fire escape.18
In the following example, several themes appear: the unpredictability of crime, the belief that the police are ineffective in preventing crime, and the characterization of the offender as a “nice black boy.”
I know my mother was mugged. Yeah. This was about eight years ago when I first moved out. She was coming home from bingo. My mother, the bingo maven. Did not win that night. So she had a few dollars and her bingo chips and dotters and all the crap that she keeps. And P.S. this kid comes over. She said he was about sixteen years old. Nice black boy [sarcastic]. And as she was putting the key in the door, the front entrance, he pushed her and tried to grab her bag. My mother started screaming. He knocked her down. She didn’t really get hurt. She hurt her knees because she fell on her knees. She got knocked down. He grabbed her bingo bag. And she went running upstairs. She was very upset, to say the least. I said, “Did you win that night?” She said, “Maybe I had two dollars in the bag. He’s gonna find a lot of crap!” I said, “Did you call the police?”—“What for? What are they gonna do?” I said, “You should report it anyway just because it should be reported. Can you describe the guy?” “Sure, I can describe the guy, but what good is it gonna do?” You know, the apathetic thing and doesn’t want to get involved and all that nonsense. She never saw the kid again in the neighborhood. And she moved right after that. “That’s it, I can’t take it any more.” She was really frightened. . . . (M-69)
Unfortunately, the urban world view these stories reveal is a world where interracial harmony is unachievable. Narrators reinforce prejudice by using racial slurs throughout the stories, by lacing the stories with editorial comments and asides, or by harping on negative racial stereotypes. The use of folk narrative to display racial prejudices is not new to the study of folklore.
Folklorists and cultural historians who have studied the Afro-American folk tale, and specifically the trickster tale, have discussed how these narratives have been used within Afro-American culture. In the trickster tale, the slave often pokes fun at his master to get the upper hand in a difficult situation. The white slave master usually demands that the black slave perform some action, or be the butt of some joke. However, in the story, the master is often duped by the slave, who ultimately exerts some control, however covert, over him.19 The observations made about the Afro-American trickster tale show that character traits such as deceit-fulness and trickery were successful ways to avoid physical or mental cruelty. By being shrewd and clever, the black slave could attempt to control his world, if only in narrative form, and achieve some sense of self-worth. As Lawrence Levine and others have also pointed out, slave narratives reinforced the black fear of white power. Thus, trickster tales were a constant reminder of how such power could be undermined.20
Have the tables turned? Are whites now using crime-victim stories in the same fashion that blacks used trickster tales? While it is only conjecture, this intriguing question is worth considering. Several informants implied that they held animosity towards blacks and/or Hispanics. “They always get out their guns” seemed to be a euphemism for “blacks,” whom many whites stereotyped as invariably armed or into creating trouble. Of course, like most stereotypes, these generalizations are absurd. Yet in the world view of the crime-victim story, there seemed little room for ambiguities: the Goetz shooting simply reinforced their perception.
The Afro-American trickster tale, a shield against hatred and discrimination, has been replaced today by Afro-American forms that present and promote black pride. But for whites, the situation has changed. If what Charles Silberman writes is true—that whites fear the very presence of blacks—then is it not plausible that crime-victim stories told by whites express hostility toward blacks, and particularly a fear of young black males, who statistically are in the highest offender group? The supposition that crime-victim narratives are now used as a covert way to both express and shield race hatred and fear by whites toward blacks, just as blacks used trickster tales to express opinions against whites, indicates how groups still use and manipulate expressive narrative forms to deal with situations in which they feel powerless. The plight of the slave in the antebellum South and the white man on the Times Square street corner are obviously too incongruous to compare. But what is being suggested is that we need to pay attention to how any group that feels powerless (for complex historical and economic reasons, or because of what is perceived as an insolvable urban problem) can creatively manipulate a narrative form to express, no matter how covertly or how unflatteringly, their point of view.
Informants, then, present a dualistic world view. On one hand, they assume New York City to be unsafe; yet, on the other, they expect it to be a cultural paradise. While most informants viewed New York as the city of Gotham, others reminded me that it is a “fun town,” a city that never sleeps, a city unlike any other in the world. Both components of this world view are needed for urbanites to have a coherent, balanced view of their urban world.
A final component of this world view deals with how some informants view the world in general, as fair or unfair, just or unjust. Many victims not only feel powerless in their situations, but they also feel that they, too, are somehow to blame. To control their fear, and to provide a rationale for being victimized at random, many stated that they were “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And on occasion, informants said that some victims “got what they deserved.” These views are consistent with the ideas of Melvin J. Lerner, who coined the term the just world hypothesis to describe his theory that victims are often seen as getting their just rewards. This is especially true when nonvictims cannot project themselves into the victim’s situation:
Individuals have a need to believe that they live in a world where people generally get what they deserve. The belief that the world is just enables the individual to confront his physical and social environment as though they were stable and orderly. Without such a belief it would be difficult for the individual to commit himself to the pursuit of long range goals or even to the socially regulated behavior of day-to-day life. Since the belief that the world is just serves such an important adaptive function for the individual, people are very reluctant to give up this belief, and they can be greatly troubled if they encounter evidence that suggests that the world is not really just or orderly at all.
The justness of others’ fate thus has clear implications for the future of the individual’s own fate. If others can suffer unjustly, then the individual must admit to the unsettling prospect that he too can suffer unjustly. As a consequence of the perceived interdependence between their own fate and the fate of others in their environment, individuals confronted with an injustice generally will be motivated to restore justice. One way of accomplishing this is by acting to compensate the victim; another is by persuading oneself that the victim deserves to suffer.21
Lerner’s “just world hypothesis” clearly relates to the telling of these crime-victim stories. The stories present two distinct views of the city world. The first is the ideal of the just world that tellers would like to believe exists, where neighbors help each other, people help victims, and property and life are respected, as well as personal space and possessions. Narrators present this ideal world outside of their stories, a world that they wish existed. But in the unjust world within these stories, property is taken without consent, policemen are incapable of providing assistance, and bystanders don’t give a damn. Once the victim is compensated, even by being listened to empathetically, or the victim is blamed, the stories then can become a vehicle for restoring order and justice in the victim’s, potential victim’s, narrator’s, or listener’s perspective. They permit urbanites to convince themselves that the world is still safe. Not only do they function in this manner, but the telling of these personal-experience stories also creates a constantly re-forming folk group based on the common factor of crime victimization. These stories are conversational icebreakers and allow for instant expressions of empathy and camaraderie between tellers and listeners who share the world view that crime victimization is a major feature of city life, or who have been victimized. As Roger Abrahams has noted, the sharing of personal-experience stories allows us to engage with others “with whom we have never otherwise had a relationship.”22 Crime-victim stories shared with fellow urbanites thus create, sustain, and reinforce a sense of community between victims. One needs only to arrive late at a party after being mugged and be regaled with similar experiences told by those present. Whether the victim knew the tellers or not prior to the party is inconsequential.
The basic assumptions that form an urban world culled from these narratives about city life are far from new: density, heterogeneity, cosmopolitanism, alienation, and disregard for others are well-documented features of the urban environment. What is of issue and concern is the relationship between a narrative expressive form, the crime-victim narrative, and these features of urban life. Certainly, the crime-victim narrative is a product of the urban environment; it discusses a distinct problem that affects the quality of life of most city dwellers. Most important, it is a product created by urbanites themselves to address the vexing problem of crime, which has baffled urban planners, law enforcers, and city bureaucrats. The crime-victim story is an ingenious way for city people to attempt to express their concerns about victimization, independently from the authorities, whose role is to study urban crime, enact laws, and effect change. The vitality and energy of urbanites, here New Yorkers, has resulted in the creation, transmission, and utilization of a specific type of personal-experience narrative, the crime-victim story. This type of personal narrative expresses the fears, concerns, and values that are important to those who lead an urban life. The crime-victim story, replete with its own themes, character types, and functions, and instilled with values for everyday living, proves that people respond in creative, innovative, and yet traditional ways in order to understand the world around them. The urban crime situation is perceived as so overwhelming by many people I spoke to, that the telling of the crime-victim story allows them to humanize the problem, reduce a nebulous fear of crime, and attempt to gain some control over their lives and actions.
At first glance, it may seem that the negative features of urban life discussed here work against the idea of the crime-victim story as a creative expression of urban folklore. But that is not the case. The crime-victim story is an expressive response, on a folk level, of integrating an urban problem with a traditional solution. While it may seem that everyone in New York “just gets shot,” as Sal, the tourist victim, would probably try to convince us, these conceptualizations about the urban environment, regardless of how negative they appear at first, are manipulated into powerful images and shaped into a structured story. The city dwellers I spoke with have creatively manipulated these urban events and experiences into a forceful and traditional story about urban crime and victimization, often unknowingly contributing to a rich source of folklore and traditional expression in the urban environment.