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New York, everybody knows, is a violent city, perhaps the violent city. Mean streets and fat cops and that exhilarating feeling that, someh...

New York, everybody knows, is a violent city, perhaps the violent city. Mean streets and fat cops and that exhilarating feeling that, somehow, you8217;re always in danger. The city wears its violence like a badge.

I live on Gramercy Park, the one bit of New York, New Yorkers tell me, that8217;s meant to be just like London, although there8217;s nothing remotely like London outside my window.

Within the past three months, this is what I8217;ve seen. On the corner, I saw a policeman confront a man wielding a knife while holding a woman and baby hostage. They escaped uninjured, while the culprit was dramatically wrestled to the ground and handcuffed.

Two blocks away an elegantly dressed man in a green wool suit was crossing the street, carrying a briefcase. When he was halfway across, a car, which had been waiting for this moment, started up, accelerated, sped around the corner, and struck the man so hard that he flew into the air and landed on the windscreen of a taxi. The taxi-driver lost control, ran into a fire hydrant, and was knocked unconscious, pressing against his horn.

And then there was this astonishing incident, just outside the Gramercy Park Hotel Seedy enough to be frequented by young rock bands and visiting British paperback publishers. I happened to notice a young couple leaving through its revolving door. The man, in his early 20s, was dressed in a T-shirt and black jeans, and had a flamboyantly pierced ear. The woman, a blonde, was wearing a short black leather skirt. Someone appeared, a man, who called out something 8212; a name 8212; stepped forward, and shot the young man in the chest. Like that. A shout. Two steps. Bam. And the young man8217;s T-shirt erupted in a cauliflower of pink goo.

These are, admittedly, exceptional moments. In fact, they are the only moments of physical violence that I8217;ve witnessed in New York. I8217;ve seen no road rage. For all the shouting that New Yorkers do, I8217;ve seen no one get out of his car and strike another driver. For all the clubs, and the drinking until four in the morning, I8217;ve never seen a bar fight, although I8217;ve regularly seen pub fights in any number of British provincial towns. I8217;ve been to Yankee games and mixed with off-duty drunken firemen and foul-mouthed clowns from the Bronx, and never once suspected that any one of them would even think of punching someone out of allegiance to their team.

But I have seen these three things, virtually outside my door. They were extreme, theatrical 8212; just like TV, the movies, just like New York. And that8217;s because each one was being performed for a camera. The violence was all made up.

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New York is violent, but it8217;s not violent in the way we have been led to believe: all that taxi-driver, Scorsese, NYPD stuff. In fact, there8217;s a curious conceit being perpetrated by the office of the mayor of New York, Rudolf Giuliani.

In the past six years, New York has become statistically and undeniably a less dangerous place. This is, one suspects, highly alarming to the people who run the city. How else to explain a very different trend: that there are statistically more violent films about this city than ever before? The Mayor8217;s office has 14 people whose mission is to make filming in the city easy. New York wants its images on the world8217;s screens, and it doesn8217;t care what those images depict. A permit to show that New York cops are brutal and disgusting? No problem. Prostitution, drug dealing, Mafia hits? Hey, you just have to ask. A crowd riot that involves closing down streets and tunnels 8212; please! Last year, 21,286 days8217; worth of filming took place here. Next year, there will probably be even more. And many of these shows are just as violent as the ones shot outside my building. After all, this is New York.