Most Americans living today had not yet been born when Etan disappeared. And, with all due respect to the excellent work of the NYPD and the prosecutors, it was not detective work and shoe leather that finally brought this case to a close and Pedro Hernandez to justice. If he had kept his mouth closed — if he had been a harder sort of criminal — this would remain one of those unsolved cases perennially revisited on the ghoulish television programs dedicated to such things.
New York City is a much safer place than it used to be, and you can’t afford to live in SoHo, the Patz family’s old neighborhood (average rent for a two-bedroom in a doorman building: $8,500). The country is a much safer place than it was in 1979, 1989, 1990 (2,605 murders that year) or 1999. For all the loose talk of “carnage” in Chicago and elsewhere, most of our big cities have seen much the same thing happen to their crime rates, albeit not quite as dramatically as in New York.
But, if anything, we are more afraid now than we were then, to the extent that Lenore Skenazy’s “free-range kids” initiative — which suggests only that children be allowed to sometimes play or explore their neighborhoods without direct adult oversight — seems to some people radical, even irresponsible. Just as a cow or a bee is, statistically speaking, a great deal more likely to kill you than is a shark or a bear or an Islamist, we tend to focus on some dangers even though they are unlikely.
But the unlikely happens, which is precisely why the case of Etan Patz terrifies us. And it happens without any obvious pattern, explanation, or motive that suggests to us strategies for avoiding it or doing what it is we’d all be tempted to do and breaking necks. For all of our police and security agencies, our concealed-carry permits, and the locks on our doors, there is nothing to be done.
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