Part IV: Reading Comprehension (30%)
in this section there are four reading passages .followed by a total of fifteen multiple-choice questions. Read the passages carefully and then mark your answers on your Answer Sheet.
TEXT A Zero Tolerance
New York was once the murder capital of the world. But its urban canyons are no longer the killing fields that earned the city its unenviable title. The annual death, which soared to a record high of 2,245 in 1990,dropped to 760 in 1997. The last time the murder rate was as low as that was 30 years previously in 1967, the year of peace and love and the flowering ofhippiedom. With the decrease in killing has come a marked reduction in enthusiasm for other crime, such as burglaries, robberies and shootings. The old saying, crime doesn’t pay, has taken on new life, thanks to hard-line policing introduced by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1994. Its success has been such that Giuliani, elected five years ago on a law and order platform, confidently says his city can now be seen as a leader in crime fighting. Such a claim would once have been unimaginable, but the zero-tolerance policing policy introduced by Giuliani and the two men he appointed to run the city’s police force, former commissioner with Bratton and former deputy commissioner John Timoney, has turned the mean streets into clean streets.
New York’s policing is based on a 1983 paper called "Broken Windows," written by American academics Janes Wison and George Kelling, which suggested a clamp-down on low-level crime as a way of lowering all crime, lfa broken window in an apartment block was not fixed, it was a sign that no one cared. Soon more windows would be broken and a sense of lawlessness engendered, encouraging others to commit more crime. Cleaning up minor crime on the streets was like fixing broken windows, it said, and the flow-on effect would curb more serious crime.
New Yorkers voted for a special tax to raise about US 1 billion to fight crime and another 7,000 officers were added to the force. The responsibility for ways of fighting crime devolved from a centralised bureaucracy to precinct commanders, and police used computers to track and target crime trends more easily.
This resulted in a much harder attitude against all crime, "zero tolerance" being the policy of not allowing or tolerating even the smallest crimes. These included begging, minor drug dealing, taggers, turnstile jumpers in the subways and all forms of anti-social behaviour on the streets. Timoney uses turnstile jumpers as an illustration of the broken windows theory at work. Police found that 22 percent of turnstile jumpers were wanted for other crimes or were able for arrest because they carried guns. "We arrested one man simply for jumping a turnstile and found that he was a drug dealer carrying cocaine and 50,000 in his pockets," says Timoney.^ New York’s transformation attracted global attention and cost Bratton and Timoney their jobs. They were both sacked by Giuliani, who felt they were stealing his glory. Timoney has since acted as a consultant to police throughout the world, preaching the benefits of zero-tolerance policing. Ironically, Bratton, the former Boston beat cop who rose to head Now York’s finest, evidently doesn’t like the term zero-tolerance because he thinks it implies a lack of tolerance for any deviation from social norms. Critics of New York policing say that intolerance is exactly what zero-tolerance policing encourages. They point out that urban crime has fallen right across the United States in the past five years not just in New York, and even in states where zero-tolerance policing is not practised, while the country’s jail population has dramatically increased. Shifts in the nature of America’s population ages and character have reduced the number of young men (aged 18-24) most likely to best involved in crime. Crime is also reduced when many more criminals are in jail. |
