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The City That Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control
The forty-percent drop in crime that occurred across the U.S. from 1991 to 2000 remains largely an unsolved mystery. Even more puzzling is the eighty-percent drop over nineteen years in New York City. Twice as long and twice as large, it is the largest crime decline on record.
In The City That Became Safe , Franklin E. Zimring seeks out the New York difference through a comprehensive investigation into the city's falling crime rates. The usual understanding is that aggressive police created a zero-tolerance law enforcement regime that drove crime rates down. Is this political sound bite true-are the official statistics generated by the police accurate? Though zero-tolerance policing and quality-of-life were never a consistent part of the NYPD's strategy, Zimring shows the numbers are correct and argues that some combination of more cops, new tactics, and new management can take some credit for the decline. That the police can make a difference at all in preventing crime overturns decades of conventional wisdom from criminologists, but Zimring also points out what most experts have the New York experience challenges the basic assumptions driving American crime- and drug-control policies.
New York has shown that crime rates can be greatly reduced without increasing prison populations. New York teaches that targeted harm reduction strategies can drastically cut down on drug related violence even if illegal drug use remains high. And New York has proven that epidemic levels of violent crime are not hard-wired into the populations or cultures of urban America. This careful and penetrating analysis of how the nation's largest city became safe rewrites the playbook on crime and its control for all big cities.
In The City That Became Safe , Franklin E. Zimring seeks out the New York difference through a comprehensive investigation into the city's falling crime rates. The usual understanding is that aggressive police created a zero-tolerance law enforcement regime that drove crime rates down. Is this political sound bite true-are the official statistics generated by the police accurate? Though zero-tolerance policing and quality-of-life were never a consistent part of the NYPD's strategy, Zimring shows the numbers are correct and argues that some combination of more cops, new tactics, and new management can take some credit for the decline. That the police can make a difference at all in preventing crime overturns decades of conventional wisdom from criminologists, but Zimring also points out what most experts have the New York experience challenges the basic assumptions driving American crime- and drug-control policies.
New York has shown that crime rates can be greatly reduced without increasing prison populations. New York teaches that targeted harm reduction strategies can drastically cut down on drug related violence even if illegal drug use remains high. And New York has proven that epidemic levels of violent crime are not hard-wired into the populations or cultures of urban America. This careful and penetrating analysis of how the nation's largest city became safe rewrites the playbook on crime and its control for all big cities.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published October 23, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
February 2, 2012
More dry and academic than I would have preferred. Lots of fascinating statistics about the unprecedented drop in crime over the last 20 years in NYC, but no stories, no characters to remember. Here's the whole book in two sentences: Crime dropped by 40% across the US in the 90's and nobody knows why. Crime continued to drop by another 40% in NYC in the oughts and we think maybe it had something to do with policing?
July 29, 2012
Although mainly composed of endless facts, stats, tables, and bar graphs, this book does at least show how stark New York City's crime decline has been, and eliminates many of the typical explanations for it.
First, many say that New York was just part of the great crime decline of the 1990s in the US (the subject of Zimring's previous book), but nationwide the number of seven "index crimes" (homicide, aggravated assault, rape, larceny theft, auto theft, burglary, and robbery) dropped 40% since 1991, while they dropped 80% in New York City (auto theft is only 6% (!) of what it once was), and New York's crime decline encompassed much of the 2000s, when nationally crime was fairly stable. Even compared to the other largest cities, where the crime drop was steepest, New York had a 32% extra drop in burglaries and robberies, and a 12% extra drop in homicides relative to the median big city.
Zimring argues that policing made the difference. Not that he shows exactly why. He mainly eliminates other explanations. He shows that drug use has been fairly stable (there have remained about 40,000 hospital discharges for drug overdoses a year, mainly cocaine and opioids, and a consistent number of about 80% of criminals arrested have tested positive for drugs (!)). The demographic makeup of the city has been fairly stable. Unemployment and poverty have fluctuated around a stable mean with no seeming relationship to crime. Most surprisingly, the number of New York City residents incarcerated has declined since 1997, and is now lower than it was in the late 1980s (about 50,000 residents from a 60,000 peak).
So Zimring shows that it is probably the police attention to "hot spots," and aggressive tactics like stop-and-frisk that probably explain the crime drop. While the number of incarcerated New Yorkers has gone done, arrests for misdemeanors have gone up (though he strangely disputes the very existence of "quality of life" policing through an odd reading of prostitution and gambling arrests). The number of ex-cons returned to prison for parole violations has gone up, while those returning for new felonies has gone down. The point is that New York crime fighting strategies have worked because their punishments are more certain and swift, though less severe overall. So there's hope here that crime can come down without mass incarceration, though many won't like the aggressive police street presence that this requires. Still, after this book I wanted some more real descriptions and stories of how it all happens, with fewer charts and tables. For better or worse though criminology remains largely a numbers game.
March 9, 2016
Zimring is far from an eloquent writer. The structure of each chapter and subsection begins something like this: I will first talk about A, second I will talk about B, third I will talk about C. This becomes stale very quickly, as does the endless reporting of statistics which are very well represented in equally abundant graphs. All this said, as professor in a Criminal Justice department, I think this book should be required reading for every undergraduate entering a Criminal Justice major. It very systematically and patiently describes the dramatic and unprecedented crime decline in the four boroughs New York City from 1990-2009, asking what factors and variables may have been primarily responsible. He debunks many criminological theories ("supply side criminology", primarily) along the way, and ultimately concludes that the New York 'difference' (vis a vis the national drop in crime) can be explained by hot spot policing and the destruction of public drug markets. He emphasizes repeatedly the take away---that crime is not an inevitable feature of urban life, but rather, something that is variable and "malleable." Very positive news, in general, and one that should be used to shape Criminal Justice policy, as New York decreased incarceration levels at the same time that it witnessed its crime decrease. Highly recommended--it is not an enjoyable read, but a necessary one.
Read
November 12, 2024•While crime dropped all over the country in the ‘90s by a similar amount, the drop in New York lasted for longer and ended up being about twice as large of a drop. Zimring sets out to explain the “New York difference.”
•Much of the first part is incredibly dry and unreadable recitations of statistics that, in short, Zimring asserts show that demographic and economic changes unique to New York City do NOT explain the “New York difference.” If anything, the young male population (which commits most crime) was growing through much of the decline.
•Changes in policing are the only variable that is constant across all 4 of the large boroughs that can explain a meaningful proportion of the drop in crime (maybe ~40%?). Demographic or economic changes differed across the boroughs, but crime rates dropped across the city.
•Actual research on policing is relatively new (1960s)
•Also, it’s easier and more likely to prove that a particular intervention doesn’t have an effect than to find what interventions DO have an effect. So in policing research, there’s a lot of undermining of received wisdom and old ways of doing things, without much of an affirmative vision for what to do instead.
•So, there’s not much of an incentive for police departments to consent to participate in research if they’re going to have to do more work, just to have public faith in their practices undermined. There’s a lot of status quo bias.
•During the period of the NYC crime decline, police staffing peaked at 40% higher than 1990 levels, then dropped and leveled off at 20% higher than 1990 levels.
•Patrol and detective staffing increased during the crime drop period, vice operations staffing declined. Narcotics staffing spiked a lot, and then declined below 1990 levels - perhaps a consequence of success after open-air drug markets had been suppressed?
•Besides staffing, NYPD’s other simultaneous reforms included increasing “preventative policing,” more centralized authority and data collection (“compstat”), and focused crackdowns on guns, open air drug markets, and crime “hot spots.”
•Preventative policing: Disproportionately racialized marijuana arrests were proportionate to the known racial proportions of people committing robberies and burglaries. Arresting suspicious people for minor offenses is a way of getting them off the street temporarily, getting fingerprints, and determining whether they might be a suspect in any open cases. The selective enforcement of marijuana laws looks obviously unfair and biased when white kids are smoking pot and not getting arrested, but there is an underlying logic and efficacy to using minor offenses as a pretense for focusing effort on major offenses. (The same applies to turnstile jumping.)
•By the same logic, marijuana arrests were also disproportionately male. Marijuana use is almost evenly split between men and women, but over 90% of marijuana arrests were men.
•When people say “broken windows” policing is disproven or discredited, they’re lumping together two separate theories. Street prostitution is one of the classic “broken windows” crimes, and yet NYPD never significantly cracked down on prostitutes. This is because prostitutes aren’t the same people committing other, worse crimes. Arresting young /men/ committing minor infractions in public is effective, because that’s how you find the people who commit worse crimes, and prevent them from committing them.
•Case in point, NYPD briefly committed a huge spike of arrests for gambling. They found the people they brought in that way were not guilty of other crimes, so then they stopped performing those kinds of arrests. They persisted, on the other hand, with marijuana arrests, because they found it was a more effective way of catching people who commit worse crimes.
•”Two of the New York City strategies are proven successes and obvious choices for cities with the special problems they addressed —hot spots emphases and tactics, and the destruction of open air drug markets.”
•Findings on increased manpower in NYPD inconclusive, and it’s a very expensive intervention to invest in without certainty. This doesn’t mean it’s not worth it, it just means we don’t know.
•There is no conclusive evidence about “the aggressive use of stops, frisks, and pretextual minor arrests.” Again, this is a costly intervention to invest in without more certainty, though in this case in the form of social costs to minorities instead of fiscal costs.
•During the period the New York crime decline surpassed the rest of the country, incarceration was increasing in the rest of the country, but not NYC. This is pretty damning to the previously predominant theory that crime control is about locking up some fixed population of criminally-inclined people.
•The failure to consider policing reform in the ‘80s strikingly parallels the recent NIMBY problem—state and federal governments are simply blind to problems and solutions at the municipal level. Prisons were the states’ responsibility, so that’s the tool they looked to in order to solve the problem.
•Looking at the New York data, contemporary activists against mass incarceration should be very enthusiastic about more police. The notion that more policing and more incarceration go together is completely faulty. More effectively preventing crime from happening in the first place reduces incarceration.
•This tradeoff was explicitly acknowledged in negotiating the ‘94 crime bill—conservatives were inherently sympathetic to police, and liberals begrudgingly preferred more policing over more incarceration. How did we forget this?
•Further, federal and state funding for urban police is explicitly a good financial deal for urban liberals! So many policies transfer tax dollars out of the city to rural and suburban areas, but here was a deal where conservatives would gladly agree to send funds back to the big city!
•The NYC crime decline did NOT reduce overall drug usage, but ending open air drug markets and drug-related killings goes a long way to assuaging the general public’s concerns about drugs. The failure to reduce drug usage is what people mean when they say “the war on drugs failed,” but cracking down on public drug sales and consumption has positive effects in reducing public disorder and other crime. (Again, see marijuana arrests.)
•”The combination of consistent populations and sharply lower rates of serious crime that New York experienced must result because criminal propensities are situational and contingent. The same person can commit many more or many fewer serious offenses, depending on modest changes in street environments in his immediate neighborhood, in where and how drugs are purchased, and in whether the particular locations where robberies and assaults have taken place frequently are now under special police surveillance… We don’t have to change the world to significantly reduce safety crime.”
•”The risks and burdens associated with urban life fall most heavily on poor and minority populations, but nowhere else with the special force of urban violence and crime. African American and Hispanic minorities are the overwhelming majority of the victims of any big city’s most dangerous forms of criminal violence. The same communities also dominate the statistics on criminal offenders, and this creates a second major cost to the communities and the families where crime and violence is concentrated. The blunt ends of urban crime control —stops, arrests, jailing, and imprisonment—remove young men of color from the same streets and neighborhoods where they are the predominant crime victims. Not without reason has urban violence been called the most regressive tax in modern American life. // If there is any bright side to the intense concentration of criminal offending among the urban poor in New York City, it is that real progress in crime control becomes one benefit where New York’s poor get more value than the more advantaged populations that have already moved out of high-risk neighborhoods and live in buildings with doormen. But just as poor neighborhoods benefit from lower crime, the sons and brothers of families of color are also disproportionately at the receiving end of aggressive policing and “quality of life” law enforcement. So the political economy of crime control in its New York City style is complicated —the poor both pay more for aggressive street policing and benefit more to the extent that crime control efforts succeed.”
•The above quote is striking in just how different the discussion of these tradeoffs was as recently as 2012. Today we take these downside costs so for granted, while we generally fail to acknowledge the progressive benefits of reducing crime in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
•(This is crying out for a mention that polling constantly shows black voters want more police in their neighborhoods, despite white progressive protests to the contrary.)
•Again, more policing, by preventing crime from happening in the first place, REDUCES mass incarceration in these communities, not to mention the lives saved and life-altering injuries prevented through the reduction in homicide and assault.
•Young men of color being subject to more aggressive police stops is a real cost to be paid, and it’s understandable to ask whether the cost of any given policy is worth it. But if we look back historically at how much worse things were, and acknowledge that public policy is always a question of tradeoffs, it seems fair to say that the reduction in death, injury, and incarceration is a huge upside to be weighed against that cost. Again though, while it’s intuitive that aggressive stops would help, there isn’t conclusive evidence due to the difficulty of isolating variables in the vast array of reforms NYPD implemented all at once. There is evidence from a Kansas City study that merely increasing patrols without increasing stops is not adequate to explain the “New York difference.”
•The biggest takeaway Zimring emphasizes is simply that the enormous drop in crime in NYC over this period shows what is /possible/. If New York achieved twice as much of a drop in crime as most other US cities did from 1990-2010ish, then we have great reason to believe that other cities still have room to reduce crime by a meaningful amount.
•Much of the first part is incredibly dry and unreadable recitations of statistics that, in short, Zimring asserts show that demographic and economic changes unique to New York City do NOT explain the “New York difference.” If anything, the young male population (which commits most crime) was growing through much of the decline.
•Changes in policing are the only variable that is constant across all 4 of the large boroughs that can explain a meaningful proportion of the drop in crime (maybe ~40%?). Demographic or economic changes differed across the boroughs, but crime rates dropped across the city.
•Actual research on policing is relatively new (1960s)
•Also, it’s easier and more likely to prove that a particular intervention doesn’t have an effect than to find what interventions DO have an effect. So in policing research, there’s a lot of undermining of received wisdom and old ways of doing things, without much of an affirmative vision for what to do instead.
•So, there’s not much of an incentive for police departments to consent to participate in research if they’re going to have to do more work, just to have public faith in their practices undermined. There’s a lot of status quo bias.
•During the period of the NYC crime decline, police staffing peaked at 40% higher than 1990 levels, then dropped and leveled off at 20% higher than 1990 levels.
•Patrol and detective staffing increased during the crime drop period, vice operations staffing declined. Narcotics staffing spiked a lot, and then declined below 1990 levels - perhaps a consequence of success after open-air drug markets had been suppressed?
•Besides staffing, NYPD’s other simultaneous reforms included increasing “preventative policing,” more centralized authority and data collection (“compstat”), and focused crackdowns on guns, open air drug markets, and crime “hot spots.”
•Preventative policing: Disproportionately racialized marijuana arrests were proportionate to the known racial proportions of people committing robberies and burglaries. Arresting suspicious people for minor offenses is a way of getting them off the street temporarily, getting fingerprints, and determining whether they might be a suspect in any open cases. The selective enforcement of marijuana laws looks obviously unfair and biased when white kids are smoking pot and not getting arrested, but there is an underlying logic and efficacy to using minor offenses as a pretense for focusing effort on major offenses. (The same applies to turnstile jumping.)
•By the same logic, marijuana arrests were also disproportionately male. Marijuana use is almost evenly split between men and women, but over 90% of marijuana arrests were men.
•When people say “broken windows” policing is disproven or discredited, they’re lumping together two separate theories. Street prostitution is one of the classic “broken windows” crimes, and yet NYPD never significantly cracked down on prostitutes. This is because prostitutes aren’t the same people committing other, worse crimes. Arresting young /men/ committing minor infractions in public is effective, because that’s how you find the people who commit worse crimes, and prevent them from committing them.
•Case in point, NYPD briefly committed a huge spike of arrests for gambling. They found the people they brought in that way were not guilty of other crimes, so then they stopped performing those kinds of arrests. They persisted, on the other hand, with marijuana arrests, because they found it was a more effective way of catching people who commit worse crimes.
•”Two of the New York City strategies are proven successes and obvious choices for cities with the special problems they addressed —hot spots emphases and tactics, and the destruction of open air drug markets.”
•Findings on increased manpower in NYPD inconclusive, and it’s a very expensive intervention to invest in without certainty. This doesn’t mean it’s not worth it, it just means we don’t know.
•There is no conclusive evidence about “the aggressive use of stops, frisks, and pretextual minor arrests.” Again, this is a costly intervention to invest in without more certainty, though in this case in the form of social costs to minorities instead of fiscal costs.
•During the period the New York crime decline surpassed the rest of the country, incarceration was increasing in the rest of the country, but not NYC. This is pretty damning to the previously predominant theory that crime control is about locking up some fixed population of criminally-inclined people.
•The failure to consider policing reform in the ‘80s strikingly parallels the recent NIMBY problem—state and federal governments are simply blind to problems and solutions at the municipal level. Prisons were the states’ responsibility, so that’s the tool they looked to in order to solve the problem.
•Looking at the New York data, contemporary activists against mass incarceration should be very enthusiastic about more police. The notion that more policing and more incarceration go together is completely faulty. More effectively preventing crime from happening in the first place reduces incarceration.
•This tradeoff was explicitly acknowledged in negotiating the ‘94 crime bill—conservatives were inherently sympathetic to police, and liberals begrudgingly preferred more policing over more incarceration. How did we forget this?
•Further, federal and state funding for urban police is explicitly a good financial deal for urban liberals! So many policies transfer tax dollars out of the city to rural and suburban areas, but here was a deal where conservatives would gladly agree to send funds back to the big city!
•The NYC crime decline did NOT reduce overall drug usage, but ending open air drug markets and drug-related killings goes a long way to assuaging the general public’s concerns about drugs. The failure to reduce drug usage is what people mean when they say “the war on drugs failed,” but cracking down on public drug sales and consumption has positive effects in reducing public disorder and other crime. (Again, see marijuana arrests.)
•”The combination of consistent populations and sharply lower rates of serious crime that New York experienced must result because criminal propensities are situational and contingent. The same person can commit many more or many fewer serious offenses, depending on modest changes in street environments in his immediate neighborhood, in where and how drugs are purchased, and in whether the particular locations where robberies and assaults have taken place frequently are now under special police surveillance… We don’t have to change the world to significantly reduce safety crime.”
•”The risks and burdens associated with urban life fall most heavily on poor and minority populations, but nowhere else with the special force of urban violence and crime. African American and Hispanic minorities are the overwhelming majority of the victims of any big city’s most dangerous forms of criminal violence. The same communities also dominate the statistics on criminal offenders, and this creates a second major cost to the communities and the families where crime and violence is concentrated. The blunt ends of urban crime control —stops, arrests, jailing, and imprisonment—remove young men of color from the same streets and neighborhoods where they are the predominant crime victims. Not without reason has urban violence been called the most regressive tax in modern American life. // If there is any bright side to the intense concentration of criminal offending among the urban poor in New York City, it is that real progress in crime control becomes one benefit where New York’s poor get more value than the more advantaged populations that have already moved out of high-risk neighborhoods and live in buildings with doormen. But just as poor neighborhoods benefit from lower crime, the sons and brothers of families of color are also disproportionately at the receiving end of aggressive policing and “quality of life” law enforcement. So the political economy of crime control in its New York City style is complicated —the poor both pay more for aggressive street policing and benefit more to the extent that crime control efforts succeed.”
•The above quote is striking in just how different the discussion of these tradeoffs was as recently as 2012. Today we take these downside costs so for granted, while we generally fail to acknowledge the progressive benefits of reducing crime in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
•(This is crying out for a mention that polling constantly shows black voters want more police in their neighborhoods, despite white progressive protests to the contrary.)
•Again, more policing, by preventing crime from happening in the first place, REDUCES mass incarceration in these communities, not to mention the lives saved and life-altering injuries prevented through the reduction in homicide and assault.
•Young men of color being subject to more aggressive police stops is a real cost to be paid, and it’s understandable to ask whether the cost of any given policy is worth it. But if we look back historically at how much worse things were, and acknowledge that public policy is always a question of tradeoffs, it seems fair to say that the reduction in death, injury, and incarceration is a huge upside to be weighed against that cost. Again though, while it’s intuitive that aggressive stops would help, there isn’t conclusive evidence due to the difficulty of isolating variables in the vast array of reforms NYPD implemented all at once. There is evidence from a Kansas City study that merely increasing patrols without increasing stops is not adequate to explain the “New York difference.”
•The biggest takeaway Zimring emphasizes is simply that the enormous drop in crime in NYC over this period shows what is /possible/. If New York achieved twice as much of a drop in crime as most other US cities did from 1990-2010ish, then we have great reason to believe that other cities still have room to reduce crime by a meaningful amount.
Want to read
December 28, 2011i'm skeptical.
April 27, 2020
criminally boring and hilariously sparse with actual content. don’t be fooled by the hundreds of figures.
this book reads like a 9th grader who has approximately 6 facts at his disposal and manages to weave together a 10 page paper the night before it’s due. i don’t even want to write more, lest this book seep more of my time away.
this book reads like a 9th grader who has approximately 6 facts at his disposal and manages to weave together a 10 page paper the night before it’s due. i don’t even want to write more, lest this book seep more of my time away.
Want to read
March 22, 2012November 18, 2015
"New York's very low rates have happened in a setting of populations that usually have higher victimizations. This makes a remarkable statistical achievement even more remarkable when considered in demographic perspective." (42)
"The remarkable capacity of the country's largest city to make huge strides in crime reduction without increasing investment in confinement has yet to become an important issues in crime control policy discourse but perhaps it should." (75)
"Compstat was not merely a method of gaining control over crime in New York City, but also a strategy for the equally difficult task of getting control of the New York Police Department." (121)
"So the apparent susceptibility of potential offenders to modest environmental modifications is an encouraging indication for a very wide spectrum of anti-crime interventions -- for beat police, for probation officers, for tutors in after-school programs, for parents and mentors. The malleability that is a common characteristic of persons at risk to commit serious crime is potentially important good news for any credible program of help or supervision or diversion." (195)
"For this age group [15-24], criminal homicide was by far the leading killer of young men in 1990 -- accounting for 62% of all deaths, just under two-thirds of the death rate from all causes. The silver lining to this devastating 1990 concentration is that the drop in homicides over the next 19 years reduced the total death rate for young men under 24 in New York City by more than half all by itself!" (206)
"The remarkable capacity of the country's largest city to make huge strides in crime reduction without increasing investment in confinement has yet to become an important issues in crime control policy discourse but perhaps it should." (75)
"Compstat was not merely a method of gaining control over crime in New York City, but also a strategy for the equally difficult task of getting control of the New York Police Department." (121)
"So the apparent susceptibility of potential offenders to modest environmental modifications is an encouraging indication for a very wide spectrum of anti-crime interventions -- for beat police, for probation officers, for tutors in after-school programs, for parents and mentors. The malleability that is a common characteristic of persons at risk to commit serious crime is potentially important good news for any credible program of help or supervision or diversion." (195)
"For this age group [15-24], criminal homicide was by far the leading killer of young men in 1990 -- accounting for 62% of all deaths, just under two-thirds of the death rate from all causes. The silver lining to this devastating 1990 concentration is that the drop in homicides over the next 19 years reduced the total death rate for young men under 24 in New York City by more than half all by itself!" (206)
February 27, 2012
An incredibly dry and wonkish study of NYC's plummeting crime rates. Still an essential and informative for historians of policing, crime as well as criminologists, sociologists and social workers. Zimring challenges past policing scholars like James Q. Wilson and his "Broken Windows" theory and suggests that the NYPD did the exact opposite; police problem areas harder.
Zimring comes to an uncomfortable, and very problematic, conclusion: stop-and-frisk policies perhaps have been a benefit to controlling violent crime which overwhelmingly affects minorities more than non-Hispanic whites and Asians. This especially timely and relevant as at the time of this writing the NYPD are facing increasing pressure to halt "stop-and-frisk" policies. I won't even go into their surveillance of Muslim citizens, itself another scandal that has come to light recently. Zimring chooses to remain mum about the moral implications of such policies. He merely states what the findings show. That leaves a lot to desire but I understand his objectives. This study is also rich with graphs and charts which reveal both its strengths and limitations. Perhaps he could have thought about writing a study with the intention to appeal to a larger audience instead of other policy wonks?
Zimring comes to an uncomfortable, and very problematic, conclusion: stop-and-frisk policies perhaps have been a benefit to controlling violent crime which overwhelmingly affects minorities more than non-Hispanic whites and Asians. This especially timely and relevant as at the time of this writing the NYPD are facing increasing pressure to halt "stop-and-frisk" policies. I won't even go into their surveillance of Muslim citizens, itself another scandal that has come to light recently. Zimring chooses to remain mum about the moral implications of such policies. He merely states what the findings show. That leaves a lot to desire but I understand his objectives. This study is also rich with graphs and charts which reveal both its strengths and limitations. Perhaps he could have thought about writing a study with the intention to appeal to a larger audience instead of other policy wonks?
April 8, 2015
Crime rates throughout the United States dropped significantly in the 1990s (by about 40 percent). Crime rates in New York City dropped even faster than the national average and continued to decline in the 2000s, leading to a decrease of about 80 percent in less than two decades.
What is the reason for this astonishing decline? No one really knows. Popular theories (policing, imprisonment, demographics, economics) explain less than half of the decline, even when stacked together. While the dramatic rise in crime rates during the 1960s was accompanied by theorizing about vast societal changes, no such theorizing has accompanied the striking reversal.
Zimring's "most important lesson" is that "very high rates of violent crime are not hard-wired into populations, cultures, and institutions of big cities in the United States." This is somewhat unsatisfying but still fascinating -- it certainly challenges my assumptions that important societal trends are at least understandable in retrospect, if not fully predictable in advance.
What is the reason for this astonishing decline? No one really knows. Popular theories (policing, imprisonment, demographics, economics) explain less than half of the decline, even when stacked together. While the dramatic rise in crime rates during the 1960s was accompanied by theorizing about vast societal changes, no such theorizing has accompanied the striking reversal.
Zimring's "most important lesson" is that "very high rates of violent crime are not hard-wired into populations, cultures, and institutions of big cities in the United States." This is somewhat unsatisfying but still fascinating -- it certainly challenges my assumptions that important societal trends are at least understandable in retrospect, if not fully predictable in advance.
March 3, 2013
Chock full of data, charts and diagrams, it's not an easy book to read. On the other hand, empirical data shows the easy explanations and easy fixes for crime to be just that. New York's crime rate went down 80% from the 1990's to the present and has stayed that way! Nothing about the city had had changed in terms of demographic, number of incarcerations (in fact, more people being discharged than jailed). What seems to have made much of the difference is policing.
The authors found that adding additional confinement onto long prison terms will only save extra crimes if we can successfully make particularly long-term prediction of dangerousness! And we cannot predict dangerousness even in the short term -- ask Adam Lanza's mother.
The authors found that adding additional confinement onto long prison terms will only save extra crimes if we can successfully make particularly long-term prediction of dangerousness! And we cannot predict dangerousness even in the short term -- ask Adam Lanza's mother.
October 10, 2014
Excellent analysis of the drop in crime in New York from 1990 - 2009. Central point is that certain changes in police protocol were the main drivers of the drop in crime after he considers changing demographics and social factors could not have played that large of a role. Relevant today when there are discussions over aggressive police tactics including pretextual arrests and stop-and-frisk stops.
Analysis is great but the writing could have been improved and used a better editor (sometimes citations are missing from the reference or charts contradict the narrative).
Analysis is great but the writing could have been improved and used a better editor (sometimes citations are missing from the reference or charts contradict the narrative).
February 24, 2016
A masterpiece of policy analysis, especially Chapter 5, which details and evaluates methodically a wide range of reforms—organizational, tactical, and more—to policing in New York City. While clear, chockfull of helpful charts and tables, and sometimes amusing, it’s a real slog of a read. In the end, though, it’s well worth the effort. Even readers knowledgable on crime and crime policy are likely to have their preconceptions challenged by this cogent, hyper-analytic unpacking of New York City’s stunning 80% decline in serious crimes in the 90s and 00s.
February 20, 2013
Interesting, but not really a book as much as a bound academic paper.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews