Declining crime rates: insiders' views of the New York City story.

• Author: Kelling, George L.

1. INTRODUCTION

   Something dramatic happened in New York City in 1004: a lot of people stopped committing crimes, especially violent ones. The reduction in the number of persons committing murders, for example, while not unprecedented,(1) was extraordinary. Since 1994, a debate has raged about why this happened. Putting our position up front, we believe the police played an important, even central, role in getting people to stop committing crime in New York City. Despite arguments to the contrary,(2) no evidence exists that the substantial drops in crime in New York City, especially the initial ones when one of the authors of this paper, William Bratton, was commissioner, were the result of economic change, changes in drug use patterns, or demographic changes. Arguably, New York City's economy, drug use patterns, and demography might be different now in 1998. Unemployment was at 10% the month Bratton took over the New York City Police Department (NYPD) (January 1994) and at 8.7% when he resigned (April 1996)--hardly a booming economy. And remember as well, the initial reductions in crime were so steep that by August of 1995--three years ago, but only twenty months after Bratton took office--New York magazine declared in a cover story, "The End of Crime As We Know It."(4)

   Readers should understand that this debate about the origins of crime reductions in the United States, especially in New York City, are not just academic in the sense that detached scholars are searching objectively for some "truth" lurking out there somewhere in the data. In fact, criminological and political ideologies have shaped a good portion of this debate and are barely beneath the surface of even the most "detached" presentations. We do not pretend to be free from strong points of view about what happened in New York City. We were there and our presence belies any "detached objectivity." Yet, we are not alone in having important vested interests in the outcome of the debate.

   Aside from the lack of any competing explanations, our confidence that the police played an important role in New York City has three origins:

   (1) We had a guiding "idea" about how to prevent crime; put another way, we had a theory of action;

   (2) We applied this idea in New York City's subway and, without anticipating it, the subway experiences became the "pretest" for what was to happen later citywide;

   (3) Bratton, most importantly, but Kelling as well, had been struggling with issues of how to improve policing through police leadership, management, and administration for over two decades--principles developed in the context of organizational and policy literature and experience.

   In the three sections that follow, we will be brief. We have written elsewhere about these issues and will not repeat our arguments here in detail.

2. THE "IDEA"--BROKEN WINDOWS

   The "broken windows" metaphor had its origin in an Atlantic Monthly article by James Q. Wilson and Kelling.(5) It argued that, just as a broken window left untended was a sign that nobody cares and leads to more and severe property damage, so disorderly conditions and behaviors left untended send a signal that nobody cares and results in citizen fear of crime, serious crime, and the "downward spiral of urban decay."(6) The article also argued that whenever crime and communities verged on being out of control in the past, residents and authorities in neighborhoods moved to reassert controls over youth and over disorderly behavior.

   The implications of this point of view are that minor offenses have serious consequences for the life of neighborhoods and communities. Citizens, city officials, and police ignore them at their peril. This point of view is at odds with the reigning crime control policy view that had been developing throughout the 1950s and 1960s and made explicit by President Johnson's Crime Control Commission.(7) Police, in this view, are "law enforcement officers," the front end of the criminal justice system whose business is serious crime--arresting offenders. For a variety of reasons police got out of the business of minor offenses. These reasons went beyond the utilitarian view that scarce police resources should best be concentrated on "serious" crimes. They included an understanding of how police abused loitering and vagrancy ordinances in the past; a desire for less intrusive policing and a more judicious use of police authority in a democracy; and, a view that many of the offenses, like prostitution, are victimless.

   Nonetheless, we argued that the links between disorder, fear, and crime went something like the following:

   Disorder [right arrow] Citizen Fear [right arrow] Withdrawal (Physical & Social) [right arrow] Increased Predatory Behavior [right arrow] Increased Crime [right arrow] Spiral of Decline(8)

   According to this model, waiting until serious crimes occur to intervene is too late: dealing with disorderly behavior early, like successful communities have in the past, prevented the cycle from accelerating and perpetuating itself.(9)

   Moreover, experiences in the subway taught us that many chronic, serious offenders also behave in a disorderly fashion and commit minor offenses like farebeating. Police order maintenance activities also give police the opportunity to make contact with and arrest serious offenders for minor offenses.

   We never claimed that order maintenance alone is the sole means of preventing crime. Solving crimes, incarceration, social change, deterrence by other means, police presence and persuasion, citizen vigilance, reduction of opportunities, environmental design, and other factors play a role as well. In New York City's subway, however, we argue that order maintenance was an especially significant part of reclaiming the subway and reducing crime.

3. THE SUBWAY

   In April of 1989, Robert Kiley, Chairman of New York State's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) asked Kelling to assist the MTA in solving a problem in the New York City Transit Authority's subway (NYCTA). Kiley believed that the subway was in deep trouble--passenger usage of the subway was in rapid decline. New York City's late 1980s economic slump partially explained this decline. But marketing surveys suggested a more complicated problem: "homelessness" was frightening passengers and causing them to abandon the subway in droves. This was after $8 billion dollars had been poured into the subway to upgrade trains and tracks during the early and mid-1980s.

   The NYCTA had already largely solved the problem of subway graffiti--a problem considered so intractable that its eradication was considered by some to be one of the most successful urban policy "wins" on record.(10) Yet, despite this achievement, the frightening and intimidating behavior of a large group of miscreants overmatched whatever...