Abstract
For two reasons, anyone tempted to sit down and open Franklin Zimring’s The City That Became Safe would be well advised to make sure that they have had a good night’s sleep before doing so. First, the opening chapter contains a plethora of statistics, graphs and tables that require a great deal of concentration to get to grips with. Second, without a good night’s sleep, and once the collective messages contained within those statistics, graphs and tables become clear, the reader might be forgiven for believing that they are indeed dreaming, because what these statistics illustrate is a sustained fall in crime in New York City that is, as Zimring puts it, ‘as close to the miracle of the loaves and the fishes as criminology has come in the past half-century’ (p.153).
The ’miracle’ that this book so comprehensively examines is an approximate 80 per cent drop in most safety crime over an almost twenty year period from 1991. This is the largest crime decline ever recorded and, having presented a mountain of statistical evidence in the first chapter to illustrate this, Zimring invites us to embark upon a search ‘for a set of phenomena that have had a depressive effect on at least seven different types of crime over a period of 18 years in a pattern of closely similar impact in all four populous boroughs of the city’ (p. 27).
This, however, is no easy task. As well as being a criminological ‘miracle’, this staggering fall in crime is also a criminological and sociological mystery, having been curiously under-researched and therefore subject to ‘urban legends’, ‘popular myths’, and ‘more than their fair share of tall tales’, particularly in relation to policing policies and practices (p.100). These have, until now, largely substituted for rigorous academic explanation of the phenomena in hand. Zimring’s analysis, by his own admission does not, and indeed cannot, compensate for this lack of rigorous evaluation in this area, but it is a sizeable start.
The book is divided into three parts. The first presents the relevant empirical data and considers the fall in crime in New York City since 1990. Whilst this in itself makes for interesting reading, some perspective is gained through comparisons with other US cities, and then with other cities from around the world. What we find is that, with the exception of robbery, rates of both property crime and lethal violence in the city are at the lower end of the scale for major American cities. New York also stands up well when compared to other major Western cities, with the notable exception of lethal violence, which remains comparatively high despite the dramatic falls documented in the book.
Part Two of the book, as Zimring puts it, organizes a ‘statistical search party’ (p.151) that seeks to identify what lies behind the fall in crime in New York City over such a sustained period of time. Seemingly, the 80 per cent drop in most street crimes occurred despite no obvious or significant changes in population size, economy, education or criminal justice sanctions, and two often stated theories from the 1980s – namely fatherless high risk youths and the widespread availability of illegal drugs –are similarly disproved as likely causes. The same conclusion is drawn for levels of incarceration, which actually fell in New York whilst other American cities generally did the opposite. And so we are left with changes to policing as a possible explanation, having been previously the stuff of legend and myth. Zimring considers the large changes in policing, and a combination of new officers, new tactics, and new management as a likely cause of New York’s crime decline relative to other US cities; however, anyone expecting firm answers in this area will be disappointed. Zimring acknowledges that ‘which aspects of the many changes in the size and character of police in New York can claim credit for the big additional drop in crime is a surprisingly difficult question to answer’ (p.151). And so we are left with possibilities rather than answers.
The third and final part of the book examines the lessons to be learned from New York’s experiences for urban crime control, addresses a number of ’open questions’ about the cause(s) of the crime decline, and laments the continuing scarcity of academic work in this area. Despite the depth of analysis provided, there remain more questions than there are answers.
So what do we take from all of this? Well, Zimring’s optimism relates, it seems, to the bigger picture: ‘But what’s the big deal? With so much not known about urban crime – including the mix of forces that drove down rates in New York, the elements of policing required for street success, and the limits of crime reduction that can be produced by situational and specific area tactics – why regard the 20-year history of New York City as such a watershed? Finding as we have that the operating forces that produce epidemic levels of serious crime in the city are relatively superficial, that they are not essential elements of urban life, provides a decisive response to one of the deepest fears generated in the last third of the 20th century. We now know that life-threatening crime is not an incurable urban disease in the United States. (pp. 216–217)
In sum, Zimring’s book is a serious piece of scholarship but, as such, it is dry and rather dense in places. It is, as it should be, objectively based upon the empirical analysis that has been undertaken, and whilst that is one of its strengths, it means that it avoids the emotive aspects of some of the points that are discussed. For me, this is particularly evident in the discussion of the impact of specific police tactics on members of poor and minority communities, who are disproportionately on the receiving end of ’blunt urban crime control’ and ’aggressive policing’. For Zimring this is reconciled because ‘the poor both pay more for aggressive street policing and benefit more to the extent that crime control efforts succeed’ (p. 205). Having spent much of my career researching policing and minority communities, including in New York City, I’m not convinced that the equation is quite that straightforward.
Nevertheless, this is a substantial contribution to the criminological literature and will be of specific interest to policy makers and others with an interest in urban crime control. For everyone else, it makes for very interesting reading indeed. Just get that good night’s sleep first.