It's the Cops, Stupid!

SINCE THE EARLY 1990s, New York City has experienced the deepest and most prolonged crime drop in recorded history. Homicide, robbery, burglary, and auto theft have all fallen by four-fifths; the city’s murder rate is now lower than it was in 1961. This massive crime rout has transformed the entire metropolis, but the most dramatic benefits have been concentrated in minority neighborhoods. Mothers no longer put their children to sleep in bathtubs to protect them from stray bullets, and senior citizens can walk to the grocery store without fear of getting mugged. New businesses and restaurants have revitalized once desolate commercial strips now that proprietors no longer have to worry about violence from the drug trade. Over ten thousand minority males are alive today who would have been killed had homicide remained at its earlier levels; the steep decline in killings among black males under the age of twenty-five has cut the death rate for all young men in New York by half.