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This chapter examines crime in New York City, but uses New York as a laboratory for new theories about the linkage between crime and social structure in urban American life. New York City received a double dose of crime decline in the 1990s, with serious crimes such as murder, robbery, and auto theft dropping by more than 70%. The chapter first explores the size and character of the city's crime decline, comparing what happened in New York City with the national pattern. Second, it estimates the incremental portion of the city's total crime decline that might be the subject of a separate evaluation. Third, it probes the particular history of the city during the 1990s, searching for atypical social or policy shifts that might qualify as the explanation of the city's incremental crime decline. Fourth, it addresses the lessons to be learned from the city's adventures in the 1990s. The city stands as an example of dramatic changes in the rate and risk of violent crime without major social, economic, or ecological changes.

This chapter covers discussion during and after the 1990s of factors that had long been considered as potential crime prevention—incarceration, demography, and economic expansion. With respect to these longtime candidates for credit in crime prevention, the 1990s were a cascade of best-case outcomes—high levels of incarceration, a drop in the proportion of the population in high-risk youth categories, and unprecedented prosperity for the same nine years that crime declined. With an epidemic of good tidings, a crime decline in the 1990s should have been expected, even though only about half of the actual crime drop appears to have been caused by favorable trends in longstanding correlates of crime rates.

This chapter addresses a single question: How low can crime rates drop without major changes in the character of American life? It begins with an analysis of crime since the turn of the century. Second, it addresses the potential for future change. Have we hit bottom, and if not, how low can crime fall? Can we expect cyclical patterns, and if so, how much of an increase might be on the immediate horizon? Third, it considers the relationship between historical patterns of crime and the likely future. It argues that the five years after this book was written, 2006–10, will provide important data on crime trends and on the manifold effects of less crime on American society and government.

In 1980, Arthur Stinchcombe, Tom Smith, Garth Taylor, and several additional coauthors published Crime and Punishment—Changing Attitudes in America. The book reviewed public opinion data from the first five or six waves of the General Social Survey (GSS), plus a large number of pre-GSS polls and surveys dating back to the 1930s, all dealing with attitudes of the American public toward crime, punishment, and social disorder. This chapter revisits the principal findings, themes, and conclusions of Crime and Punishment in light of what is now 30-plus years worth of GSS data. In addition, for the first time since Crime and Punishment was published, the United States has recently experienced a sharp decline in crime rates that began in about 1994 and continued for a decade. Thus, the chapter also explores the apparent effects of declining crime rates on Americans' attitudes about crime, punishment, and related matters.

This chapter considers the three theorized causes of crime declines in increasing order of novelty—first police, then the rise and fall of crack cocaine, and finally the impact of increased access to abortion that, advocates claim, caused a shift in the crime-risk profile of birth cohorts in the 1970s. After an introductory discussion of the definition and special problems of theories that were inspired by the 1990s' decline, unequal attention is given to the three explanations covered. Over half of the chapter addresses the thesis that crime declines in the 1990s were caused by the coming-of-age of population cohorts that were altered by the impact of elective abortion in the United States in the 1970s.

This chapter identifies parallels between Canadian crime trends in the 1990s and those in the United States. First, it presents detailed records of Canadian crime trends over the period after 1980 and compares the Canadian with the U.S. experience. Second, it revisits some earlier theories of causes by discussing trends in Canadian economic, demographic, and criminal justice indicators that parallel some of the U.S. data sets that were examined in Chapters 3 and 4. A concluding section discusses the lessons to be learned from a United States–Canada comparison. The similarity of crime trends in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the detailed comparison of U.S. and Canadian crime trends during the 1990s, makes a powerful circumstantial case that a cyclical dynamic that began early in the 1990s has played an important role—independent of government policy—in the crime decline during the decade on both sides of the border.

This chapter examines the relation between incarceration and crime. It suggests that prisons can prevent crime in two ways: incapacitation and deterrence. It explains that incapacitation occurs when the crimes a person would have committed are averted because the person is in prison while deterrence occurs when the thought of going to prison is sufficiently undesirable that people shape their behavior to comply with the law in order to avoid going there. It provides statistics showing the changes in incarceration rates and crime rates in the U.S. between 1970 and 2004.

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 presents a statistical profile of how crime dropped in the 1990s. The aim is to describe the character of the crime decline, and this is done by presenting statistics that illustrate the size, the range of offenses, and the length of the decline and how those features set what happened between 1991 and 2000 apart from other eras in modern American history. What the chapter examines is not simply the numbers but how the peculiar facts of the 1990s can help us understand the nature of the crime decline. The chapter begins with a series of statistical accounts of the 1990s, showing the patterns revealed by each of the vital statistics in the survey. A second section steps back from the individual statistical analysis to suggest three broader lessons to be drawn from the collective impact of several different analyses. The data show a very substantial and nationwide drop, across all categories of serious crimes, steadily progressing through the decade. It is also a decline that came as a total surprise to all the professional observers of crime and criminal justice in the United States.

This chapter isolates seven important lessons that can be derived from the known facts regarding crime in the 1990s and provides a brief summary of the evidence for each. These lessons are as follows. The crime decline was real, was national in scope, and was larger and longer than any documented decline in the twentieth century. The crime decline of the 1990s was a classic example of multiple causation, with none of the many contributing causes playing a dominant role. It will not be possible to comprehend what caused declining crime in the United States until more is known about the parallel crime decline in Canada. New York City had a crime decline during the 1990s almost twice the national average, and the city's downtrend has continued through 2004, making it a natural laboratory for studying the effects of a lower crime environment on urban life. Two kinds of parochialism have hampered the effort to understand the effects that social and criminal justice factors have on crime rates: firstly, the failure by many investigators to consider data and insights outside their narrow disciplinary perspective; and, secondly, the failure to consider events outside the United States. Since the national crime decline ended in 2000, rates have stayed near the lowest levels of the 1990s. But there are indications that crime rates could drop further, perhaps much further, without major changes in the American social framework. Finally, whatever else is now known about crime in America, the most important lesson of the 1990s was that major changes in rates of crime can happen without major changes in the social fabric.

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.

This chapter is about a second “great divide” in attitudes about government and appropriate crime policy. The focus is not on the well-known ideological battle between left and right about crime policy, but on a more subtle contrast between optimism and pessimism about the effectiveness of governmental policies to control crime. Crime-control optimists are persons who think that what they regard as appropriate government efforts can dramatically reduce crime. A pessimist thinks that even the best tools available to government will have a minor impact on crime rates. The chapter considers the factors that influence how strongly experts, as well as citizens, believe that governmental actions can significantly influence crime rates. The main thesis is that a long period of declining crime provides an environment where those concerned about crime policy tend to believe that this year's actions by government can have substantial impact on next year's crime rate. Sustained eras of good or bad news push moods about effectiveness further than the facts warrant— what tends to happen is an overreaction rather than merely an empirically based set of changed perceptions.

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 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 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?

This chapter shows that the widely acknowledged fact that rates of crime peak in the late teen years should not be regarded as a single pattern of increase in the middle teen years followed by a peak rate and a sharp drop during the early twenties. Instead, it identifies two patterns. For one set of crimes—including arson and most property crimes—rates of arrest increase sharply to a rate much higher than that observed among adults and drop sharply after age the ages of eighteen or nineteen. A second group of crimes—including most offenses of violence—have relatively low peak rates in the late teen years. Instead of arrest rates that are two and three times those found in young adults, these “low-peak” patterns show teen rates only 30–50% higher than for young adulthood.

This chapter discusses what the entire two decades of the New York experience teaches about the major assumptions Americans have been making about methods to control crime and violence. It argues that the entire four-fifths decline in New York safety crime has important implications for thinking about crime control, even though over half that crime drop has no clearly established cause. It shows that it is more important to know that robbery rates can go down 84% than it is to know that police strategies apparently were responsible for about 40% of that decline. The volatility and variability of crime rates is a major signal to policy analysts, independent of a complete account of contributions to a decline.

This chapter describes rates of crime and incarceration levels in the United States. It also provides key factors that have influenced these rates over time (e.g., availability of crack cocaine; three-strikes laws). It demonstrates that longer prison sentences alone are unlikely to reduce recidivism.

This chapter focuses on the actions that can be adopted to prevent crime. These measures are very closely connected to the crimogenic factors are considered to be responsible for overall functioning of the criminal justice system, as well as crime. It begins with a look at the approaches adopted for the prevention of crime, including deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution. The next is on the role of police in preventing crime, which also addresses some practical issues. Popular crime prevention approaches and other community policing schemes that are adopted by the Delhi police are also considered. Finally, chapter ends with a section on the helpline services for certain groups and the deployment of police and the crime rate in Delhi.