02/02/12
It's the Cops, Stupid! Heather Mac Donald
SINCE THE EARLY 1990s, New York City has
experienced the deepest and most prolonged crime drop in recorded history.
Homicide, robbery, burglary, and auto theft have all fallen by four-fifths; the
city’s murder rate is now lower than it was in 1961. This massive crime rout has
transformed the entire metropolis, but the most dramatic benefits have been
concentrated in minority neighborhoods. Mothers no longer put their children to
sleep in bathtubs to protect them from stray bullets, and senior citizens can
walk to the grocery store without fear of getting mugged. New businesses and
restaurants have revitalized once desolate commercial strips now that
proprietors no longer have to worry about violence from the drug trade. Over ten
thousand minority males are alive today who would have been killed had homicide
remained at its earlier levels; the steep decline in killings among black males
under the age of twenty-five has cut the death rate for all young men in New
York by half.New York’s safety surge torpedoes all conventional understandings about crime. To be sure, the country as a whole experienced its own record-breaking crime drop in the 1990s, but New York’s crime freefall was twice as steep—80 percent, as opposed to 40 percent—and lasted twice as long. Whereas America’s crime decline stalled in the 2000s, New York’s continued, cementing Gotham’s previously unimaginable status as the safest big city in the country.
You might think that criminologists would have flocked to New York to study how such a paradigm-shattering development happened. Instead, for the last decade and a half, the criminology profession has tried to look the other way. A favorite criminological pursuit in the 1990s was finding cities that equaled New York’s crime decline on a single front—homicide, say—in order to diminish the significance of what was happening in the nation’s largest city. San Diego and Boston were favorites of New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield and his professional sources, no matter how wildly different those localities’ demographics and overall crime rates were from New York’s. When, by the late ’90s, the crime drop in the rival cities had petered out or, as in the case of Boston, reversed itself, the profession lost interest in New York entirely. The city, after all, had two counts against it: it was presided over by a crusading Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, who was targeting New York’s welfare culture as well as its violence and disorder, and all early indications suggested that responsibility for the crime decline lay with the newly focused, assertive tactics coming out of the New York Police Department.
Now Franklin Zimring has broken ranks with his profession and issued a long overdue call. The New York experience demands a revision in our understanding not only of crime suppression but of urban America itself, Zimring argues in his new book, the most important criminology work in recent memory. We now know, he writes, that “life-threatening crime is not an incurable urban disease in the U.S,” but rather that it can be greatly reduced without fundamental alterations in social and economic structure. And what made the difference in New York? Here, Zimring is at his most iconoclastic. It was policing, he claims. Nothing else in New York over the last two decades, besides its style of policing, can explain that large part of its crime drop that exceeded the national average.
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