Saturday Night at Fort Apache (1973)
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Published 2023-03-25
The South Bronx was initially populated with German and Irish immigrants. and In the era preceding World War II it became at least half Jewish. After World War II, white flight took hold and it went from being two-thirds non-Hispanic white in 1950 to being two-thirds black or Puerto Rican in 1960.
When this film was released in 1973, the South Bronx was about a third black and two-thirds Puerto Rican, and the 41st was one of the most violent precincts in the city. In the previous year, nearly 11,000 serious crimes were reported there; one for every 15 residents.
The film shows members of the precinct's Anti-Crime Unit at work. These were plainclothes officers charged with proactively preventing street crime, most notably by detecting and disarming people carrying illegal weapons - a tactic which later became known as stop-and-frisk.
At the time, Anti-Crime Units had been making about 15% of all arrests in NYC, despite comprising less than 5% of the total NYPD patrol force.
https://linktr.ee/CrimeInNYC