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In Brief
- In the 1990s rates of the most common crimes plunged in most of the U.S., but in New York City the drop has lasted twice as long and has gone twice as deep.
- New York’s successes have defied common assumptions, such as that drug use fosters crime and that locking people up reduces it.
- The city’s story shows that people are not hardwired to be criminals and suggests that other cities might achieve similar results by putting more cops on the streets, especially at “hotspots” of crime.
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20 Comments
Add CommentI am trying to check the data used to come up with this conclusion. None is available. The only data i can find contradicts this article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is truly amazing! An article analyzing NYC lowering crime by increasing police on the streets. Nowhere is there any mention that this all occurred under the leadership of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, mayor from 1994 to 2001, who believed in the "broken windows" theory, that if you ignore small stuff the big stuff takes over. Pay attention to the small stuff, and the big stuff is less apt to happen. This is a well studied example of what good leadership can create, and, I suppose the only reason that Rudy did not get his due is because he is a Republican.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfthoma, did you read the article or are you intentionally astroturfing some fictitious liberal bias? To wit:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Had the city followed through on it's broken-windows policing, it would have concentrated precious resources in marginal neighborhoods rather than on those with the highest crime. In fact, the police did the opposite [...]"
And the article does say when this happened. From the early 90's to about 2000 the NYC crime rate fell along with the general trend across the nation. The article says this national trend is unexplained, though theories have been proffered by the authors of Freakonomics (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCH_OewK_KI for an illustration).
But NYC's crime rate has fallen faster than other cities, and it continues to fall - even though incarceration rates are declining, drug use rose or has remained stable, and neither poverty levels nor the unemployment rate can corroborate it.
I agree with CQPEREZ that it would be good to have a link to the actual data, but it is a pretty good article. I suggest you read it.
Someone had posited in Britain the drop in crime was due to the 'rewording' of what actually constituted what a 'crime' actually IS. This was done to make it seem like things were going "better". I don't know how one gets around the death rate though.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAfter reading the article, which I enjoyed, I thought of a different hypothesis that I would like to research a little. What is something else that correlated to the drop in crime, both and NY and across the nation? Adoption of debit/credit cards and a reduced use of cash for daily transactions. My thought is that if people are carrying less cash, which we have been at an increasing rate since 1990, than crime doesn't pay nearly as much.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople commit crimes, oftentimes, because they feel, however erroneously, that the reward is worth the risk. Reducing cash on hand at home and in your pocket has to take a toll on criminal "morale". Anyway, it would be interesting to look further into this.
That's an interesting hypothesis. It made me think of another explanation using your same idea. I have read that crime is not necessarily correlated with poverty, rather income disparity.....if everyone is poor, crime will be lower than if there is a large income disparity between the rich and poor. During the period that the article is talking about, credit availability increased dramatically. This increased availability in credit did not increase the wealth of the average citizen, but it would perhaps pacify the urge to commit crime by allowing one to attain what one wants....thus it gives one the false impression of a heightened social status as well as makes life generally more comfortable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually the decline started before Giuliani took office, and continued after he left office. It started when Dinkins raised taxes to send NYPD on a hiring spree. Giuliani does get credit for the part that took place on his watch.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd the broken window theory was promoted primarily by William Bratton, who was head of the transit police early in the 1990s and began busting turnstyle jumpers. Giuliani gets credit for making him the NYPD head, but gets no credit for firing him after people started writing that the drop in crime was due to Bratton. (Giuliani can't share credit.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlthough New York City has the strictest gun laws in the U.S., the rest of the nation (outside of Obama's superclean home state of Illinois and Arnold's pitiful California) has pretty much gone "wild West". Clearly, people have become fed up with the justice system and taken the law into their own hands. We know that 10 percent of all offenders commit 90 percent of all felonies, and it is these 10 percent of most violent and non-recidivist that the courts love to covertly release back on the streets. A lot of cops and diploma-mill lawyers would be out of work otherwise. There were roughly 11,000 murders in America in 2008, yet there were twice that many deaths by firearms, not including suicides. Any cop can tell you that there is an extreme reluctancy to listing "justifiable homicide" on a death certificate, as that would favor the normalization of vigilantism. Thus a home-defense shooting does not appear statistically as a crime nor a violent death.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOther than that, we also know that kids today have already had sex on average before junior high school, and therefore are not motivated to commit rape later on in life (rape is too boring and TIRING compared to video games). Violent crimes don't make money any more, and pretty girls can be had for a few bucks. The appeal is gone. Nobody had to redefine "crime"; it redefined itself.
How dare they include a reduction in car theft in their statistics. Of course, any car worth stealing is protected by GPS. Stealing a car is the fastest ticket to prison there is. Traffic cameras and the all-felon DNA database? Are they taking credit for those too? Legalized sports betting has forced even the Mafia into lay offs. Medicare fraud and investment banking are the only crimes left, and one of them isn't even illegal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisit seems strange that the statistics do not reflect a major change during that period that caused a lot of the decline in crime. that was ending wellfare. i worked in the high crime areas of LA during the 1990-1992 period and found that the comfort of wellfare allowed the gang members to have their bread and butter so they could stay active at night. ending it made them concentrate on income. check the time line.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately I don't think very highly of the article. I was expecting more and was disappointed. Too many times the author cannot be definitive. The words "seem to have been" are found often when pointing to a cause. It is a total mystery to the author why the reduction in crime across the country occured and in NYC specifically. The author appears to be much more definitive about what he considers is not the cause, i.e. jail time. Then there is the typical "elite-speak" in a single paragraph, "better off....if it could slove its deeper social problems - improve its schools, reduce income inequalities and enhance living conditions....but....can be changed without making expensive structural and social changes." Only out of an ivory tower.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe author contradicts himself when he calls for us to "enhance living conditions" when he notes one of the real causes of overall crime reduction is thought to be increasing prosperity. Isn't that what enhanced living conditions are? Can we just pull a government lever for enhanced living conditions? I suspect that the author reveals himself to be a social engineer which is why he cannot understand that the market forces of increasing prosperity bring social benefits without being engineered or interfered with by the elites. What did we learn from the article that we didn't already know? We have all read some time ago, that in the urban environment, increased policing at hot spots reduces crime. Sorry but I was hoping to learn something new. Kept looking for the punch line.
Best to all.
"But the single most important cause, he says, was an event two decades earlier: the legalization of abortion in New York State in 1970, three years before it was legalized nationally by the Supreme Court. The result, he maintains, was a huge reduction in the number of children who would have been a greater than average risk of becoming criminals during the 1990's." (John Tierney citing Steven D. Leavitt, an economist at the University of Chicage, in an article called THE MIRACLE THAT WASN'T, New York Times, April 16, 2005.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrankin Zimring’s “How New York Beat Crime” is a persuasive and well-documented account of how the city dramatically reduced major crime while at the same time exploding the common myths that to do so a city must at the time seriously reduce poverty, drug use and unemployment. Near the end of the article he mentions that even NY’s much reduced homicide rate is much higher than that of large cities in the rest of the developed world. It goes on to suggest that to further lower its rate NY must address social issues. This would seem to ignore a major pachyderm in the parlor: namely that in these foreign nations gun ownership is far smaller is the ease of obtaining same.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisccurtis0 correctly noted that the authors of Freakonomics had a theory to explain the nationwide drop in crime that the article only hints at on p.78 where it is stated, "The percentage of population in the most arrest-prone bracket, between 15 and 29,declined at essentially the same rate as it did nationally...".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisccurtis0 correctly noted that the authors of Freakonomics had a theory to explain the nationwide drop in crime that the article only hints at on p.78 where it is stated, "The percentage of population in the most arrest-prone bracket, between 15 and 29,declined at essentially the same rate as it did nationally...".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisccurtis0 correctly noted that the authors of Freakonomics had a theory to explain the nationwide drop in crime that the article only hints at on p.78 where it is stated, "The percentage of population in the most arrest-prone bracket, between 15 and 29,declined at essentially the same rate as it did nationally...".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis nationwide decline in crime is a significant contributing factor to the reduction of crime observed in New York. The authors of Freakonomics attribute this nationwide decline to the 1973 US Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade which legalized abortion. The logic is clear - as more unwanted pregnancies are terminated, fewer unwanted (and unloved) children are born so fewer will grow up to be criminals. And the timing is perfect - 1973 + 15 = 1988.
The authors of Freakonomics were careful to say that they were NOT advocating abortion as a tool for reducing crime. Nevertheless, it's importance as a contributing factor should not be ignored.
I wonder whether the authors thought of including white collar crime, like the Madoff scam and the mortgage backed securities that Wall Street knew were toxic, sold anyway and made huge profits betting against them. Even adjusted for inflation, my guess is that the dollar volume of "crime" has soared in NYC.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe conclusion maybe hurray; but I didn't like the article. For a science magazine like Sciam I expect more in depth analyzis. The story behind. This has not outsmarted an average daily newspaper aricle. So no enlightend aha moment for me. Hopefully next time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFreakonomics noted that legalized abortion was a big factor.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this