by Bob Herbert, The New York Times
In a world teeming with war and terror, you take your good news where you can get it. And some of that good news is here in New York.
You’d have to go back to 1962, when Robert Wagner was mayor and you could rent a three-bedroom apartment with a terrace on West 72nd Street for $149 a month, to find a month that had as few homicides as New York City had last month.
The 32 murders recorded by the Police Department in February was the lowest number in any month since the city began tracking crime statistics on a monthly basis in 1962.
To paraphrase a mid-60’s Sinatra hit, 1962 was a very mild year. John F. Kennedy was president, “The Sound of Music” was on Broadway, and you could take a nearly weeklong cruise to Bermuda for $160. The idea that the murder rate now would be the same as it was then is astonishing.
The plunge in crime in New York since the bloodletting of the late 80’s and early 90’s has been breathtaking. And there are many reasons. The first, as Police Commissioner Ray Kelly puts it, is that “size matters.” The New York police force, compared with departments in other big cities, is enormous. There are nearly 40,000 cops in New York. That’s a small army. (Los Angeles, for example, with a population about half that of New York, has 8,900 officers.)
Plans for a big buildup in the size of the department began in the Dinkins administration. The buildup got under way in January 1994, when Rudolph Giuliani took office. That coincided with important advances in police management techniques.
Nearly all experts agree that New York has been extraordinarily sophisticated in the use of computerized strategies for the effective deployment of police officers. The Compstat program developed during the Giuliani years has become a model for much of the country and in many other parts of the world.
And even as the police force was expanding and Compstat was being put in place, the terrible plague of crack cocaine that had brought insane levels of violence to the city’s streets began to ease. Attitudes in the hardest-hit neighborhoods changed. People were sickened by the violence. Children traumatized by the murder of older siblings or cousins or parents or friends turned away from crack, and crackheads eventually became pariahs.
I think young New Yorkers have gotten too little credit for the changes in their behavior that have contributed to the curtailment of crime in the city.
Also important was the city’s commitment to getting guns off the street, and the enactment of federal gun control measures. Richard Aborn, a longtime gun control advocate, said, “We finally understood how inextricably linked guns are to violent crime, and that’s had a big impact.”
Other reasons that are frequently cited may not have played as large a role as some people believe. The improved economy in the second half of the 1990’s may have contributed to the national drop in crime. But it’s not likely it played a significant role in New York. The turnaround here trailed that of the national economy. And New York’s precipitous decline in crime was well under way by the time the city’s economy rebounded.
Similarly, the enormous numbers of criminals locked up over the past decade or so would seem to have been a big factor in any drop in crime. But the evidence shows that this phenomenon was a bigger deal in places like Texas and California than in New York, where there was never a huge spike in the number of city residents locked up in state prisons.
The recipe for success in New York has been more cops, smarter policing, fewer guns, a drastic decline in the use of crack and better behavior by young people.
So what’s ahead? The city is facing huge budget problems that make it difficult to maintain Police Department strength at its highest levels - a little over 40,000. There are about 38,000 officers now, and that will increase to 39,200 after July 1. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly have both said they will attempt to hold the line there.
As for deployment, Mr. Kelly said, “We still have to keep ourselves focused very much on the issue of crime suppression.” But in the aftermath of Sept. 11 the department also has what he described as “this sort of overarching issue that can’t be ignored - counterterrorism.”
He said he was confident the department could do both.