The City Journal in New York attempts to explain why the crime rate in America’s largest city has continued to decline or hold steady even as other places have experienced increases following the historic crime drops of the past 15 years. Heather MacDonald notes New York’s “breathtaking” crime declines and points out the crime increases in recent years in such cities as Boston, Milwaukee, Memphis, Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco and Kansas City.
“Something qualitatively different is going on in New York,” said one expert. MacDonald writes, “That difference is policing. Throughout the nineties, critics of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the assertive policing that he championed tried to explain away the New York crime turnaround as a mere reflection of the national crime picture…But none of the favored criminological explanations can really explain what happened in New York.”