Why Did Crime Fall in New York City?
By SEWELL CHANDid the “broken windows” strategy and CompStat drive down crime in New York City in the 1990s?
Both strategies are indelibly linked to former MayorRudolph W. Giuliani and his first police commissioner, William J. Bratton.
Social scientists and criminologists have endlessly debated the extent to which effective policing was truly responsible for the drop in crime, compared with other factors like the higher incarceration rate, improved economic conditions, the lessening of the crack cocaine epidemic, a relative reduction in the numbers of 16- to 24-year-olds and even the abortion rate.
A new round of the debate took place this morning in Manhattan, during the annual meeting of theAmerican Sociological Association. The meeting, which continues through Tuesday, drew some 6,100 sociologists this year from around the world.
Among the three experts who gave presentations, the consensus seemed to be that effective policing matters – but not nearly as much as Mr. Giuliani and other city officials (including his successor Michael R. Bloomberg) have claimed.
First, some context. The broken windows theory, pioneered by George L. Kelling and often lumped together with the notion of zero-tolerance policing, holds that aggressive enforcement against minor quality-of-life crimes, like loitering and fare-beating, deters further petty crime and ultimately drives down major crime. Compstat is the computerized system Mr. Bratton and one of his top deputies, Jack Maple, devised to keep track of crime problems and hold police commanders accountable for addressing the most crime-prone areas.
Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, spoke first. His research is heavy on statistical analysis, but his general point seemed to be that the correlation between a surge in misdemeanor arrests in the 1990s (one measurement of tougher policing) could not be used to explain the the drop in homicide (a major example of crime reduction) once variations among different neighborhoods are taken into account.
“The story is complicated,” he said. “Clearly, the relation between policing, disorder and crime is cloudy.” A combination of socioeconomic changes and changes in the “physical order” of the city’s neighborhoods probably drove the decrease in homicides in the 1990s, although tougher policing and the drop in cocaine use also played some role, he said.
Andrew Karmen, a sociologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of “New York Murder Mystery: The True Story Behind the Crime Crash of the 1990s” (New York University Press, 2000), spoke next.
Mr. Karmen was more decisive in his presentation, focusing on the role that Compstat has played in driving down crime in New York. He noted that Mr. Giuliani had promised to implement Compstat-like programs across the federal government if elected president.
Mr. Karmen noted that many police departments across the country and even overseas “have adopted a Compstat approach to their daily operations” and added, “A virtual cottage industry has developed as former N.Y.P.D. officials have been hired as consultants to set up Compstat in other departments.” The strategy was seen as so effective, Mr. Karmen noted, that in 1996 Time Magazine called the N.Y.P.D. the “Lourdes of policing.”
A 2001 survey found that more than one-third of nation’s 515 largest police departments had implemented Compstat in some form.
However, Mr. Karmen said, the results in cities that have adopted the Compstat model have been mixed: Philadelphia is “in the grip of a murder wave,” Seattle’s homicide decline “has flattened out,” and the New Orleans police remains as ineffective as it was before Hurricane Katrina. The same dismal trend, he said, goes for Minneapolis, Louisville, Boston and Baltimore.
Mr. Karmen said that it can be hard to evaluate Compstat for a key reason. If crime rates go down, its proponents credit the program. If crime doesn’t go down, the program’s proponents say the program’s six core elements – a clear mission, internal accountability, geographical organization of operational command, organizational flexibility, a reliance on data and innovative problem-solving tactics – were not faithfully followed. Mr. Karmen said he did not rule out the latter explanation: “Implementing Compstat could be a matter of degree, and some departments just don’t get it.”
Yet, he said, “None of the other cities have experienced anything like New York’s remarkable improvement in public safety.” So either those other cities all failed to follow Compstat fully, or Compstat, he said, “is not the entire reason why crime went down.”
Michael P. Jacobson, the director of the Vera Institute of Justice, who was probation and correction commissioner in the Giuliani administration, was the final speaker.
Mr. Jacobson discussed a remarkable phenomenon: Far more arrests took place than in the early 1990s, and yet the number of New Yorkers in jail or in prison has declined.
Before the Giuliani era, he said, about half the people arrested for low-level offenses would get a desk-appearance ticket ordering them to go to court. The proportion now is about 10 percent.
“Essentially, everyone who’s arrested in New York City, in the parlance of city criminal justice lingo, goes through ‘the system,’” Mr. Jacobson noted. “Most everyone who’s arrested spends, on average, 24 hours in some kind of lockup before they see an arraignment judge.”
Even a short period in a holding cell can be enough to deter further law-breaking, he said:
For a lot of people who go through the system repeatedly, going through the system one more time is probably not a life-altering experience. But if you’ve never gone through the system, even 24 hours – that’s a shocking period of punishment. It’s debasing, it’s difficult. You’re probably in a fairly gross police lockup. You probably have no toilet paper. You’re given a baloney sandwich, and the baloney is green.
The city’s jails now hold about 13,000 to 14,000 people, down from roughly 23,000 in 1993.
“There are tons more people coming in, but they stay for far shorter periods of time, which drives down the need for jailbeds in New York City,” Mr. Jacobson said.
The same pattern holds for the prison system, he said. The city used to send about 20,000 inmates each year to the state prison system; the number now is about 8,000.
During the question-and-answer session that followed the presentations, Mr. Karmen was more explicit about what he saw as the reasons for the crime decline.
“Street crime is a distorted form of social protest,” he said. “It comes out of anger, hostility to the system, to the man, to the rules, to the conditions of life that are so harsh. Frankly, I don’t see young people – including young minority males – being so angry any more.”
There remains “a hard-core group of people that are disconnected socially, marginalized, out of work, out of school” that continues to engage in drug-dealing and violent gun play, he said, but far more people have had their anger diluted by “the consumer society.”
(On a side note, he added that the diminution in anger is both good and bad. “They’re not committing crimes, but they’re not tackling these social conditions that have to be remedied,” he said.)
Mr. Jacobson said that “a general consensus” seems to have emerged that effective policing in New York has made some difference – even though “the statistical effects, if they are there at all, are small.”
Joyce Purnick of The Times, who attended the meeting, asked the panelists why the most serious crimes in New York, including homicides, have continued to decline even though crime levels have been moving upward in other cities.
“ In scholarly circles, that’s like it happened yesterday,” Mr. Jacobson said, adding, “It’s a mystery.”
