Heather Mac Donald 20 January 2015
Who knew that the return of William J. Bratton to serve as New York police commissioner, a position he held from 1994 to 1996, would signal a return of some of the hoariest anti-police conceits from that era as well? In a column blasting Broken Windows policing (which targets public-order offenses like graffiti and turnstile jumping), New York Times reporter Ginia Bellafante dusts off one of the Times’s favorite questions from the 1990s: “Why doesn’t New York police itself like San Diego does?” San Diego lowered its violent crime rate from 1991 to 1998, and again from 2002 to 2012, by more than New York did, Bellafante says, without allegedly employing what she calls “broken-windows tactics.”
Times reporter Fox Butterfield regularly trotted out the same comparison in the 1990s, and it is even more inapt today than it was then. San Diego and New York’s demographics and crime profiles are worlds apart. San Diego doesn’t have a large entrenched underclass, nor did it ever have a serious violent-crime problem. Its murder rate in 1993, a year before Bratton took over the NYPD, was two-fifths that of New York. New York had 1,946 murders in 1993; San Diego had 133. Gang members did not—and do not—regularly gun each other down in San Diego as they still do in New York’s public housing projects. Yet despite San Diego’s much lower violent crime rate, in 1999, the allegedly pacific San Diego police department fatally shot civilians at 15 times the rate of the NYPD.
What about that gap from 1998 to 2002 in Bellafante’s New York–San Diego comparison? …
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