The City's Crime Rate

An op-ed by Franklin E. Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the crime drop in New York can't easily be fully accounted for with police tactics alone ("Little Changes, Big Results," The New York Times, April 8, 2007):

Three policing changes introduced after 1990 account for between a quarter and a half of the city’s decline — hiring more officers, increasing the aggressiveness of policing tactics and changing management systems — but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Indeed, at least half of New York City’s drop in crime reflected a national phenomenon that had nothing to do with policing. What New York City has proved is that huge changes in crime and violence can happen without fundamental changes in urban populations, economic opportunity, housing, schooling, culture or transportation. This demonstration has destroyed the conventional wisdom of social science and the major assumptions of almost all scholars.

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What the New York City experience teaches is that modest changes in urban environments can produce big changes in crime levels. Add up all of the changes in police numbers and tactics, in population, in economic opportunity and jobs, and you are talking about a city that is perhaps 10 percent different from what it was 15 years ago. But that 10 percent difference has made a huge difference in life-threatening crime. It turns out that our populations, the places they live and the institutions that touch their lives are not hard-wired to produce high and invariant levels of urban crime.

Zimring also mentions that crime rates dropped in spite of the usual conditions associated with urban crime: poverty, crowding, easy opportunity to commit crimes, etc.

Good news, perhaps, but it doesn't account for why the crime that's still there is still there. Perhaps much crime was outsourced to other states? Criminals probably have trouble living in expensive, dense urban environments too.

More importantly, how might urban institutions actually play a part in preventing crime? New York City is a place where people are outside a lot, even at night. Could it be that while being outside could produce opportunities to commit muggings, such opportunities are negated by the presence of others who might be willing to stop such actions? Also, while New York has a reputation for being jaded, a typical New York neighborhood is full of friends, families, and casual acquaintances willing and able to stand up for each other.

Perhaps urban environments aren't a model for everyone to follow, but there's something to be said for the success of one of the world's most superlatively urban environment.