New York City in modern times disheartens me. The sanitized, more orderly civic state causes trepidation. Maybe because my most memorable times were during New York’s criminal heyday, or maybe it’s the juxtaposition of working with cops today and witnessing first-hand the diluted focus of what modern policing in New York has become. Either way, there is an ever-present reminder that the bad ‘ole days weren’t really that bad. Much like the dramatic reductions in crime, I have no explanation for the change, except to say that there is a demonstrable difference.

As a native New Yorker, I have definitely seen some changes, but that alone is so cliché. Everyone above ground has seen changes, no matter where one resides. Come to think of it, every generation advances the same tiresome cliché. I remember reading Walt Whitman in graduate school, as he discussed the breakdown of society in reprints of the Brooklyn Eagle, written 35 years before the Brooklyn Bridge was built.

From a public safety perspective, what differentiates my experience from the three generations in my family who complained before me is that I’ve watched American society actually improve over time. While we can dissect the particulars, one constant remains:  New York City is the safest big city in America, and the safest it has been in decades.

Since my street fighting days in the 1980s, I have witnessed profound changes in society. Areas of Brooklyn, littered with derelict vehicles and abandoned buildings, provided an ample habitat for squatters, and the crack-addicted.  Gradually, these areas were reclaimed and redeveloped. Redevelopment continued even as the gangs and drug wars raged in the streets. Communities in East Flatbush, and Bedford-Stuyvesant (which had the highest levels of murder and violence in the Northeast) began to lure newcomers. Into the late 1990s, I would see new faces moving in and I was perplexed. They stood out like hipsters in the ghetto, but they all supported the police. I called them pioneers, but other cops called them marshmallows (soft-white people). Scruffy beards and tight-legged jeans, they could not have stood out more if they traveled in covered wagons down Fulton Street to their 4^th floor walk-ups.  Yes, they were the new lifeblood which the city was depending on, and yes, they were victimized…frequently.

Despite being tossed against walls by police (for the mistaken association of white drug buyers in a black community -- fact utilized well by narcotics officers citywide) and robbed of their belongings  by other predators with great frequency, the settlers kept coming. Priced out of Manhattan and white-collar Brooklyn, by the mid 1990s the pioneers expanded their territory. They steadily settled most of Williamsburg and into Bushwick, then claiming the fringes of Bed-Stuy, ultimately driving up prices and pushing out the poor.

Simultaneously, while the great hipster migration was happening, the science of modern policing was taking form; and what a wonderful time to be studying Criminal Justice in higher education. During this era, many municipalities began rewriting police procedures to reflect the body of knowledge and discovery being published. Theories of crime control and suppression began to take hold. Policies and procedures dealing with domestic violence, crime mapping, community policing, and targeted penalties for repeat offenders were being weaved into a strategy which would change the climate of New York City forever, and reduce crime to levels not seen since the 1950s.

Enter Mayor Giuliani. With crime-fighting experience as a federal prosecutor, the tough-talking mayor was sworn in at a perfect time. The mayor took office and pushed ahead with the crime-fighting initiatives started by the Dinkins administration before him. Dinkins’ Police Chief, William Bratton, borrowed loosely from Chicago’s crime-mapping program, tweaked it a bit, and renamed the model CompStat, short for Computer Statistics. The rest has become distorted history.

Not since 1898, when the five boroughs were united into one great city, was crime recorded in such large numbers. In the media capital of the world, many outlets proclaimed how Giuliani single-handedly reduced crime in the city. While the spin machine at Police Plaza echoed the sentiments, a few thoughtful criminologists analyzed other important variables.

Police masterminds of team Giuliani should be given praise for focusing the evolution of crime fighting at a critical peak in the crime continuum. Their calculated efforts contributed to massive reductions. But to cogently study crime one has to look at other variables with a neutral eye. As a social scientist and a career police officer, I too believe CompStat alone cannot lay claim to crime reductions.  From the 1990s onward, other cities suffering from the national crime epidemic also experienced great reductions. Recurrent violent namesakes like Detroit, St. Louis, and Washington D.C., also experienced massive reductions without a scientific system of police management.    

While Giuliani may believe his strategy affected other cities as well, a true explanation must be more dynamic. Criminologists have all sorts of educated guesses, but are largely in disagreement on a national explanation for crime reduction. Before I give my two cents, let me provide a quick overview of how crime is measured and then discuss statistics from the Department of Justice based on reported crimes.

How Crime Is Measured

As a first-world country, criminal incidents in America are rare. Watching the nightly news, one may disagree, but even in high-crime jurisdictions, the actual incidence of serious crime is small in number. Because of this, law enforcement agencies create a “crime rate” as incidents of a particular offense per one hundred thousand residents (not one hundred residents in an area, one hundred thousand). So when I say America’s homicide rate in 1991 was nearly 10 (actually 9.8) that does not mean one in 10 were murdered; it means 9.8 of every one hundred thousand residents were.  (Yet, when I say the unemployment rate in Detroit is 20 percent,  that means one person out of five is not currently working.)

The 100k population figure also helps differentiate smaller communities from larger ones, and gives a statistical starting point for measurement. Interestingly, according to the Department of Justice crime database, the majority of homicides occurred in a city with a population of one hundred thousand or more.

While large urban areas are generally where crime takes place, smaller jurisdictions should not be overlooked. According to federal crime data, many smaller jurisdictions have a far worse overall crime rate. East St. Louis (technically across the river, in the neighboring state of Illinois) is one of the most violent places in America. Scaling down for the smaller population of roughly 30,000 people, the murder rate in 2007 was 101.9. The place is a criminal wasteland. In fact, my own peculiarities draw me to visit ghettos all over the world, and I can say East St. Louis was in the top-five worst ‘hoods I’ve ever seen.  For comparison, St. Louis, Missouri, annually ranks in the top-three most violent cities in America with a devastating 37.2 homicides out of 100,000 residents. America’s overall murder rate was 5.6 in 2007. Ironically, the picturesque Rocky Mountain town of Black Hawk, Colorado (population 120) is far more violent on paper. I’ve been there too, and I felt as safe there as I have in any mountain hamlet.

Crime By The Numbers

Here is a comparison of reported crimes from the peak in 1990 throughout 2011:

Complaints reported to the NYPD. Source: NYPD.gov

For reductions like these, police officers deserve more recognition then they get. They are the front-line defenders of the city, and many police officers are killed and injured confronting a depraved element of society with very little support.

Most people look at the murder rate of a location to assess the overall quality of life. Thoughtful criminologists and police professionals prefer to analyze murder because they are difficult incidents to underreport or manipulate. Nationally, the number of homicides in 1991 was 24,703. In recent years the number has dropped to below 15,000. The murder rate in large cities dropped from 35.5 in 1991 to an all-time low of 4.8 in 2010, well after Giuliani’s term ended.

Criminologists are perplexed by recent events which have challenged traditional theories of crime. Some are questioned to explain how crime in America has drastically declined while the population has steadily increased over the decades. Adding to the theoretical conundrum is the increase of poor, less-educated, immigrant peoples --  traditionally associated with a larger portion of violent, urban, criminal incidents. Another factor adding to the social scientists’ concerns has been the economy in recent years. Empirical data suggests an increase in crime rates as the economy worsens. Yet, in the United States, that has not been the case. Violent crime overall continues to drop despite the worst economy in living memory. England’s rate of burglaries and robberies has even surpassed America’s in recent years.

Interestingly, both the F.B.I. and the NYPD completely overlooked the 2,749 innocent murders that occurred at the World Trade Center. Mayor Bloomberg and the Police Commissioner are always praising New York as the safest big city in the nation. St. Louis, which tops the nation’s murder rate, has not seen 2,700 murders COMBINED from September 11^th, 2001 until today.

Sense and Nonsense about Crime Reporting

So is New York City safer? Without a doubt, conditions in New York have improved since the 1980s.  Behind the wizard’s curtain, however, there is still concern.

Despite the sensationalism, I never consider the murder rate to determine the overall safety of a jurisdiction. Among murders, a fact remains constant for centuries-- most murder victims know their assailants. Nearly 80 percent of homicide victims are considered non-strangers by the Department of Justice. Because of the personal connection, homicides have the highest clearance rates of all serious crimes. Justifiable homicides in America are also classified as strangers. Incidents of police shootings and felony perpetrators killed by armed citizens weigh into the 20 percent figure of strangers. Among the unknown victims, many still are murdered by association: for example, mafia-style killings and street-corner drive by shootings. Either way, a middle-class Brooklynite might argue the greater good of society is not significantly compromised. However, there will always be killers and innocent bystanders aimlessly murdered, so our best efforts will always be made to apprehend criminal offenders.

An alarming trend in unknown murder victims stems from the result of mass murder settings. In 2008, 630 people nationwide fell victim to workplace/school shootings or similarly classified events.

In recent years, much has been reported on the manipulation of criminal incidents. As an unseen by-product of CompStat, there exists pressure to underreport crime. Precinct commanders are regularly transferred, denied promotion, and under constant pressure to reduce crime rates. The institutionalized pressure naturally trickles down to patrol in ways it never did in the 1980s and ‘90s. Back when reported crime was higher, and the culture of police organizations radically different, nobody cared. If a burglary occurred, the report was simply placed on the sergeant’s desk at the end of the shift, and it was filed and investigated. Today, to hide a burglary, a police report might list petty theft from a residence as a separate incident from the damage to a door, effectively downgrading a felony into two smaller incidents. Crime victims today are brushed off with greater frequency and discouraged to report criminal incidents. Every cop today has witnessed this. Studies of retired police captains and interviews with crime victims support the hypothesis, though accurately measuring the event is empirically difficult.

In the end, I would feel safer in the old days, when crime was accurately reported. Back then, the police were too busy with real crime to be bothered. Cops weren’t afraid to use their hands, and if they interacted with anyone, it was for a good reason. Today, cops are heavily encouraged to enforce petty ‘quality of life’ offenses nationwide-- more fallout from CompStat. What started as a targeted initiative against petty criminals has morphed into a revenue-driven numbers game. Sadly, today’s cop is more concerned with targeting civil society for useless offenses that have no bearing on reducing crime or interrupting criminals. Violations on paper, such as riding bicycles on the sidewalk, being in a park after dusk, and taking up more than one seat on an empty subway have dominated the landscape.

While I stray from this form of embarrassing professionalism, I’ve suffered the impact. I see it most with today’s hipsters. What was once a welcoming group as they traveled to their walk-ups now has a sour taste. Many cops still view newcomers as ‘marshmallows.’ Because they ride bicycles and enjoy their public spaces, many are now targeted by the police. They have clean backgrounds, carry good identification, and rarely get confrontational, so instead of being praised, they have become an easy number.      

Author Bio:

Eugene Durante is an NYPD Patrol Officer and former Welfare Fraud Investigator. Born in Brooklyn, 
Durante is a fourth-generation resident of Coney Island. He received his 
undergraduate and graduate degrees from John Jay College of Criminal Justice.