Safe Streets Ahead?

NYC Democrats act as if they want more crime. All it takes is being anti-gun for self protection, pro-criminals and accusations of racism for anything. m/r

Safe Streets Ahead? by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal Special Issue 2013

As the 1990s came to a close, the criminology profession declared that New York’s recent crime free fall was over. Homicides had declined a remarkable 72 percent over the previous decade, but that trend couldn’t possibly continue, the academy opined. “It is probable that another crime wave will engulf the City in the near future,” warned Andrew Karmen, a sociologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in 2000.

Karmen and his colleagues were right about the end of the crime drop; they just had the wrong city. The national crime decline, which had been only half as steep as New York’s, did stall in the 2000s, and in many places—such as Boston, once seen as a crime-fighting rival to New York—lawlessness shot back up. Only in the Big Apple did crime keep falling: from 2001 to 2012, murders went down an additional 36 percent and major felonies another 31 percent. Even the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression couldn’t reverse the city’s crime drop, as the criminology professoriate had predicted it would.

New York’s triumph over crime triggered the city’s rebirth in the 1990s, with the most powerful benefits flowing to low-income neighborhoods newly liberated from fear. Maintaining the public’s sense of security is the absolute precondition for future economic vitality. You’d think, therefore, that the next mayor would ponder long and hard before doing anything that might jeopardize this supreme accomplishment. Yet the Democratic mayoral candidates have been competing to out-demagogue one another regarding the New York Police Department, accusing it of racism and calling for fundamental change in how it responds to crime. Even if the next mayor turns out to be fully committed to keeping the NYPD on course, he and his police commissioner will probably face a new legal environment that will constrain the department’s ability to maintain public safety. Figuring out how to function in that environment will be their first challenge.

-go to link-