Declining Crime Rates: Insiders' Views of the New York City Story

Abstract

Something dramatic happened in New York City in 1994: a lot of people stopped committing crimes, especially violent ones. The reduction in the number of persons committing murders, for example, while not unprecedented,' was extraordinary. Since 1994, a debate has raged about why this happened. Putting our position up front, we believe the police played an important, even central, role in getting people to stop committing crime in New York City. Despite arguments to the contrary,' no evidence exists that the substantial drops in crime in New York City, especially the initial ones when one of the authors of this paper, William Bratton, was commissioner, were the result of economic change, changes in drug use patterns, or demographic changes. Arguably, New York City's economy, drug use patterns, and demography might be different now in 1998. Unemployment was at 10% the month Bratton took over the New York City Police Department (NYPD) (January 1994) and at 8.7% when he resigned (April 1996)-hardly a booming economy.' And remember as well, the initial reductions in crime were so steep that by August of 1995-three years ago, but only twenty months after Bratton took office-New York maga

Procedural Justice and Order Maintenance Policing: A Study of Inner‐City Young Men’s Perceptions of Police Legitimacy

“…On the one hand, order maintenance supporters tout the strategy as an indispensable crime-fighting tool (e.g., DiIulio, 1995;Kelling & Bratton, 1998;Kelling & Coles, 1996). On the other hand, aggressive policing can leave citizens feeling humiliated, violated, or even victimized (e.g., Brunson, 2007;Duneier, 1999; see also Sherman, 1993).…”

Positive social psychology: A multilevel inquiry into sociocultural well-being initiatives.

“…One such example is the 'broken windows' theory of policing: this holds that signs of social disorder (e.g., broken windows) lead to an influx of more serious criminal activity, due to the perception that policing is ineffective in that area; thus, the strategy involves aggressively targeting 'quality of life crimes' (minor disorder like vandalism) in order to prevent more serious crime (Wilson & Kelling, 1982). This has been adopted as a policing Running head: POSITIVE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 13 strategy by some U.S. cities, where it has arguably contributed to reductions in crime levels (Kelling & Bratton, 1998).…”

Testing a Crime Control Model: Does Strategic and Directed Deployment of Police Officers Lead to Lower Crime?

“…Some researchers assert that crime is caused by poverty, racism and economic injustices [13], economic, social, demographic, and ethnographic forces [7], and/or "… social issues, such as poverty, drugs, and unemployment" ( [4], p. 3). Explaining why it was believed that the police could not impact crime, McDonald ( [4], p. 3) further states, "Police functioned using traditional enforcement methods of arrest, with the belief that although they could impact individual crime patterns through the arrest of an individual, for the most part they were handicapped in being able to change the �ow of crime. "…”