How New York City Got Safe
A historical reconstruction of the Big Apple’s crime decline, told from inside the institutions responsible for public safety.
by Michael Javen Fortner
As he is sworn in today, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani takes office having already drawn a sharp line with the city’s recent past, pledging, among other things, to end police sweeps of homeless encampments. This marks a clean break from the ethos of order maintenance policing that once defined New York’s anti-crime strategies in the 1990s and early 2000s. When the outgoing mayor announced those sweeps in the spring of 2022, he gave voice to the same righteous indignation that animated that earlier era of law enforcement: “No more smoking, no more doing drugs. No more sleeping, no more doing barbecues on the subway system. No more just doing whatever you want.” Mandami’s reversal thus signals a deeper break with that past: less coercion, more compassion; less policing, more social policy. But as a recent book makes uncomfortably clear, this shift might not merely be bad policy. It might well be a grave mistake.
Peter Moskos’s Back from the Brink is both oral history and urban epic—a ground-level account of New York’s astonishing, world-historical crime decline, narrated by the cops, commissioners, city officials, and civic leaders who tried, failed, improvised, and, in Moskos’s telling, ultimately helped turn the city from a national cautionary tale into a global public safety success story. A Harvard-educated sociologist, former police officer, and current professor at John Jay College, Moskos stitches together a dense tapestry of personal recollections and hard-earned reflections to advance a simple, stubbornly controversial claim: Policing matters. No one puts the point more plainly than Louis Anemone, one of the NYPD’s highest-ranking officials in the early 1990s: “Police can affect behavior. We really can.”
For decades, academics and pundits have feuded over the so-called great crime decline. To be clear, the decline was real. Moskos opens with an astounding fact: Between 1990 and 1999, murders in New York City dropped by 70 percent, from 2,262 to 671. By 2018, the number had fallen below 300—a result he calls “a phenomenal achievement for an American city” of more than 8 million people. In less than a generation, New York transformed from the cinematic dystopia of 1979’s The Warriors into one of the safest major cities in the world.
But crime also fell elsewhere: in Washington and Los Angeles, in Boston and Dallas, not just in New York. The decline was so dramatic that it birthed a cottage industry of explanation. Depending on whom you read, the great crime drop was about economics and demography—a strong economy, an aging population, the waning of the crack markets. Or it was about mass incarceration and harsher sentencing. Or abortion access. Or lead concentration. Or new technologies and security practices, from better car locks to ubiquitous surveillance cameras. And then, of course, there is policing: the rise of “community policing,” hot-spots enforcement, performance management systems, and the whole family of “order maintenance” strategies associated—fairly or not—with “broken windows.”
Many academics, policy makers, and journalists have soured on the broken windows theory, including other variants of order maintenance policing. Even Malcolm Gladwell—perhaps the theory’s best-known popularizer from his book The Tipping Point—has recanted. “Here’s the thing I’ve come to understand about the explanation I gave for why crime fell in New York,” he said during a TED talk, 24 years after the book’s release. “I was wrong.” In many parts of the academy, to suggest that policing, especially broken windows–type strategies, played a major role in the crime drop is to endorse reactionary politics and sanction failed, racist approaches. The tendency has been to explain the great crime decline with anything but the work of cops on the street. To be clear, Moskos does not settle that argument. His book is not a statistical model or a grand unified theory of criminal justice. It is, instead, an unusually textured and contextualized effort to answer a narrower set of questions from the inside out: What did the crime decline look and feel like to the people who struggled through the city’s near collapse and then helped drag it back from the brink?
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Michael Javen Fortner, author of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, is Pamela B. Gann Associate Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow and Director of the Dreier Roundtable at Claremont McKenna College. He is also a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C. |