For a city of 8 million people, New Yorkers are fairly well behaved. There was no rioting or looting after 09.11 and very little looting, if any, during the two day blackout in August 2003. Unlike New Orleans and just about every other city south of the Mason-Dixon line, New York's crime rate is very low and so we don't have large numbers of criminal types waiting to take advantage of disaster. That may may not have been the situation twenty years ago, but that's the current reality.