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This chapter shows that the disciplinary mechanism of antiblack racism became a key instrument of governance in colonial New York City. It notes that New York City's Slave Revolt of 1712 was the act of unculturated native Africans and other slaves, who from their own distinctive worldviews, regarded colonial New York's institution of slavery as an unjust social relation. It demonstrates the specter of interracial sexual desire, especially in households where slave owners and their families lived under the same roof with black Africans.

This chapter stresses that the English Crown relied on surrogates to project its sovereignty to the English overseas colonies. Colonial administrators, clergymen, missionaries, and schoolmasters undertook the assignment of transplanting English institutions of governance and English-derived cultural institutions and systems of representation in the colonial frontier.

This chapter is a four-part down payment on the comprehensive portrait of the New York experience that the two-decade history of policing deserves. The first section provides a short history of police methods and social science understanding of the effectiveness of police circa 1990 in the United States. It describes a crisis of confidence in orthodox theories of policing produced in large part by systematic evaluation efforts that deconstructed decades of received but unproven wisdom. This left the field more open to new leadership and ideas in the 1980s and 1990s than in previous decades, but without proven methods of crime control and prevention. The second section briefly describes the three major changes in city policing and when they occurred: changes in numbers of police, changes in organization and accountability, and changes in the strategies and tactics of street policing. These changes were the inputs of the new approach to policing—the series of shifts that were supposed to prevent and control crime. The third section shifts focus from how policing changed in the city to the question of whether the sum of changes reduced crime, whether the magnitude of police crime prevention in New York can be measured, and whether the effectiveness of different segments of the multi-part shifts in policing can be separately assessed. The fourth section addresses the lessons that can be learned from available data, as well as the things that can't be known until the slow and painful bean counting of policy science displaces storytelling and salesmanship.

This chapter investigates examples of insubordination, ranging from the unruly behavior of the city's laboring class in the streets, marketplaces, dock areas, and taverns to the remarkable bids for freedom on the part of runaway servants and slaves. It points out that the largely unregulated population flows moving in and out of the port of New York compounded the problem of policing the city's servile population. It notes that the British war policy marked the abandonment of the long-standing disciplinary mechanism of governing the rulers and the majority settler population by cultivating a shaded interest between the rulers and the ruled in subjugation of the black population.

City dwellers collected together in taverns to eat and drink, converse, exchange news and information, and debate politics. New York City stood at the pinnacle of alcohol consumption, communication, and sociability in the American colonies. New York's taverns and grogshops frequently played host to British officers, troops, and sailors, bringing the Sons of Liberty and friends of government face to face. Clubs and associations, laws and polite hierarchies were in place to maintain an orderly tavern setting. Yet rebels and other dissenters often capitalized on the entropic, drunken atmosphere of taverns to create societal disorder and political upheaval. In the complex world of New York politics, whichever faction could organize and rally tavern companies would have the greatest success at mobilizing the populace. During the imperial crisis, taverns or public houses brought together a cross‐class political network that was necessary for the coherence of a revolutionary alliance.

This chapter reveals that, by the 1740s, interracial socializing among colonial New York City's subaltern population of enslaved blacks, propertyless white servants, and transients troubled ruling elite and its binary racial division of society. It explains that with the additional threat of an impending Spanish invasion, the aggravation of an unsolved crime wave, and the outbreak of a mysterious rash of fire during the winter of 1741-42, fear of the city's dangerous classes crystallized in the discovery of the “plot of 1741-42,” an alleged conspiracy among enslaved blacks and several white outsiders accused of plotting together in secret to overthrow English rule, murder the city's white male settler population, enslave white females in harems, and establish a “Negro regime” under the protection of Catholic Spain.

From the mid-nineteenth century, many Sicilians, including members of the mafia, were on the move. After sketching the contours of the mafia in Sicily in the nineteenth century, this chapter outlines the parallel history of Italian migration and mafia activities in New York City and Rosario, Argentina, and offers an analytic account of the diverging outcomes. Only in the North American city did a mafia that resembled the Sicilian one emerge. The Prohibition provided an enormous boost to both the personnel and power of Italian organized crime. The risk of punishment was low, the gains to be made were enormous, and there was no social stigma attached to this trade.

The lesson of Chapter 1 is that New York City has experienced a decline in rates of serious crime that is unprecedented in modern American history. This chapter focuses on the current circumstances of this largest of American cities. Is the city safe? And if so, compared to what? The method of analysis here is to present three different layers of comparison for the current circumstances of New York City. The first analysis looks at crime rates and risks in New York in 2009 in comparison with its 1990 circumstances—to compare the city with its former conditions and to repeat this comparison for the four major boroughs of the city. A second series of comparisons involves the current circumstances of the other major cities in the United States, not simply as a matter of statistical ranking but of the relative risk run by individuals for “fear crimes.” A third layer of comparison measures New York's current circumstances against other major cities in the developed world. How does New York City in its current condition measure up against London, Paris, Tokyo, and Sydney?

This chapter shows that the final split between the English colonial rulers and settlers in British North America provided passports to freedom for runaway slaves, who during the white American War for independence deserted their passport masters. It provides a historical analysis of the formation of the binary racial division that arose out of the project of colony building on Manhattan Island during the early modern era and took shape in articulation with divisions of class, religion, birthplace, gender, sexuality, and language.

This chapter is a wide-ranging survey of population, social, and economic factors thought to influence crime trends. It marches through various data sets to test continuity or structural change in the city over two decades. A concluding section summarizes a view of the meaning of this empirical montage. The bottom line is a mixed verdict. One of New York's four biggest boroughs—Manhattan—showed big social changes in the period after 1990 that could help explain a major crime drop. The other three major boroughs—Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx—were not transformed in such a similar fashion.

This chapter provides a statistical profile of the substantial crime decline that started in New York City in the early 1990s which has continued well past the turn of a new century. The first section of the analysis concentrates on three important features of the official statistical portrait of declining crime in the largest city in the United States—the magnitude of declining crime rates, the breadth of the drop, and the length of the decline. Each of these determinations sets New York apart from other big cities in the United States and elsewhere.

This chapter identifies a series of important unanswered questions that are priorities for future research. It organizes the “need to know” list around five main areas: the unsolved mystery of particular clause; four questions about crime rates in the future; the dynamics and the limits of preventive policing; the impact of lower crime on high-risk populations and areas; and for the final area the chapter asks the question, where have all the criminals gone?

Chapter 3 examines the immediate aftermath of the electoral reform movement’s greatest victory in the United States. Withstanding a series of legal challenges, the city conducted its first PR elections in November 1937. New Yorkers elected the most diverse legislature in the city’s history. Less than one year after the new council members assumed office, Democrats and Republicans in the state legislature pursued a statewide ban of PR. The repeal measure failed, primarily because many viewed the referendum as a crude attempt to reassert state supremacy over municipal government. As the debate over PR evolved, party officials and civic activists on both sides strengthened the notion that the fate of voting rights in New York was fundamentally tied to broader struggles over the nature of democracy in the United States and the expansion of totalitarianism globally.

This chapter argues that the crime decline documented in this study requires a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between urban life and urban crime in the 21st century. Most of the high rate of life-threatening violence and predatory crime that observers have regarded as an inherent element of the structure and social content of polyglot big cities in the United States is not a necessary outgrowth of modern urban life. The chapter is organized around four topics. The first section revisits the data presented in Chapter 1 to argue that the scope of New York's decline is singular because its variability undermines conventional assumptions about the link between urban populations and urban crime rates. The second section then contrasts previous assumptions about the malleability and variability of urban crime with the experience in New York City since 1990. The third section provides preliminary data on the impact of crime policies and crime rates on minority populations. The final section considers the implications of what we are learning about the malleability of urban crime for criminological theories about crime causation and distribution and for social theories about modern urban life.

Chapter 2 argues that reformers’ definition of democracy shifted in the late nineteenth century to incorporate the broader electorate as crucial participants in what they labeled a “good-government” movement. This change occurred as a diverse coalition of political activists joined good-government groups in calling for the ouster of Tammany Hall and affiliated organizations that had long monopolized power in New York City. By the time Judge Samuel Seabury, appointed by then-governor Franklin Roosevelt, concluded his investigations of municipal corruption at the height of the Great Depression, a reform alliance had coalesced that included elite civic associations, Communists, Socialists, labor unions, anti-Tammany Democrats, Republicans, and women’s rights activists. Activists from across the city’s political spectrum saw proportional representation as the key to their quest for municipal power. This coalition campaigned to fundamentally alter the city’s balance of political power, culminating in the victories for charter reform and PR in 1936.

Foundations have amplified top-down coordination and rapid implementation of new policies in New York City. Using social network analysis, this chapter demonstrates that foundations are primarily allied with an elite network in New York City, including top district bureaucrats and education nonprofits; advocacy organizations and parent leaders are largely excluded. Furthermore, debates over issues such as school closures and reauthorization of mayoral control have hardened political divisions in the district.

This chapter argues that when America completed its continental conquest and embarked on overseas conquests analogies between the ancient Roman and modern American empires—often themselves mediated by British imperial discourses about antiquity—were utilized to articulate and celebrate American empire. Fully aware of Great Britain's claims to being the new Rome, Americans asserted that the United States, not Great Britain, was the modern successor of the ancient Roman Empire. The American ex‐colonies themselves began to stake a claim to the inheritance of classical antiquity, both by employing the same compelling strategies and techniques of cultural ownership that had been so extensively employed by the British, and by forging new independent analogies and connections with Roman civilization and empire. Across the nation, negative references to the decadence, immorality, and imperial overreach of ancient Rome, previously common in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a defining feature of late Victorian discourses, were now overshadowed by a celebratory linking of the ancient Roman and modern American empires. Visual representations and recreations of Roman imperial prosperity and luxury stimulated consumerism and consumption in the cornucopia of the new American empire.

This chapter examines the two predominant theories of crime risk in the 1990s: the expansion of high-risk youth and the high rates of drug sales and use. These pessimistic indicators did not change much but also did not produce the criminogenic future that was expected.