This article first appeared at City Journal and is reprinted with permission.
Low-rise jeans. Wired headphones. The TV sitcom “Scrubs.” And . . . cops? You might be able to feel the vibe shift: policing is coming back into style.
Consider just a few moments, almost impossible to imagine during the fever dream that was 2020, when even “Paw Patrol” came under fire for being too “pro-cop.” NYPD Chief Aaron Edwards received a standing ovation at a Knicks game after his courageous response to a terrorist attack at Gracie Mansion. Madison Square Garden hosted a free, star-studded “Thank You, NYPD” event. And “Homicide: New York” — a documentary series that opens with a straight-out-of-central-casting detective who tells viewers, “our job is to make sure you can go home and sleep at night” — ranks in Netflix’s Top Ten in the United States.
Where is this pro-policing momentum coming from? From what we’ve seen with our own eyes, for one. Our crime concerns and activism fatigue naturally translate into renewed affection for the people who keep us safe.
In big cities like New York, it’s impossible to ignore the sense of eroding public safety. The average person is less tuned in to CompStat percentage fluctuations than to disorder in shared spaces: homelessness, illegal vendors, and other quality-of-life issues. These visible indicators affect everyone, every day, from the Upper East Side to East New York.
Polling shows that New Yorkers are dissatisfied with public safety. In a Manhattan Institute survey from last year, 55% reported feeling the city has become less safe since 2020, while only 16% thought conditions had improved.
A 2025 Citizens Budget Commission survey paints a similar picture: only 34% of New York respondents rated quality of life as excellent or good, while a mere 42% feel that their neighborhood is safe. Those sentiments are especially strong among residents of the Bronx, only 43.6% of whom report feeling comfortable walking alone at night on a neighborhood street. Black New Yorkers gave the lowest ratings for public safety in their neighborhoods.
Blue cities appear to be realizing that “root causes” or “inequity” theories of crime aren’t cutting it with the public. Instead of “reimagined policing,” they’re starting to opt for more traditional varieties. Cities like Philadelphia, San Jose and San Francisco are getting their acts together, as Keith Humphreys recently observed.
Leading the charge against progressive policies are those for whom progressives claim to speak. As Humphreys has chronicled, at a San Francisco Board of Supervisors subcommittee hearing on a motion to pursue more time-tested policies, “attendees speaking against the motion were mostly white, college-educated service providers or activists affiliated with NGOs, while those supporting it were mainly minorities who lived in the most affected neighborhoods.”
This pushback may be driving greater backing for law enforcement in New York, too. Some cops I spoke with feel like the increased support may be partly a response to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s hospital visits to perpetrators of violence against police and his dismissal of assaults on officers as just “kids who got out of hand.”
Or it may be that pro- and anti-police sentiment comes in waves. “Right now, we’re riding a good wave,” one detective told me.
Perhaps the most obvious explanation is that celebrities, influencers, and even some policymakers are finally waking up to what Americans and New Yorkers knew all along: support for police and law enforcement has always been relatively high. When we ignore the Instagram tirades, chanting activists, and viral hashtags, it’s easy to see this reality. In both 2021 and 2024, two seemingly different moments in the cultural discussion about policing, 74% of all Americans reported confidence in their local police. Among black Americans, confidence rose from 59% to 64% during that period.
Most Americans can see through the fog of their social media feeds. It’s not just that support for cops is cool again — it probably always has been.
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