The South Bronx burned, Harlem overdosed, and Brooklyn was ruled by the knives and bicycle chains of feral gangs. Then it got worse. The Mafia poured tons of China White onto the street and 13 year old warlords peddled vials of cocaine to passing cars. The media, and our own memories, present us only with a photo album of these times; an incident here, and incident there; the 77 Blackout, Bernie Goetz, crack heads, John Gotti. Streets of New York brings the fragments of New York s social unraveling circa 1970-1990 into a contiguous form, so that we may inspect it for clues about how we may more precisely control the social order in all of our cities.
The documentary subtly explores issues of race, and the media prism that separates criminal events into levels of importance by geography and social standing of criminals and victims. A treasure of archival television footage was unearthed to catalogue such phenomena as the Devil s Rebels gang terrorizing Bushwick Brooklyn in 1976, police involvement in Harlem s heroin trade, crack users getting high on camera, the worst mass murder in recent New York history, and the implementation of Rudy Giuliani s Compstat program in the War on Crime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TJrsJkzwZ0
