Zimring, Franklin E. The City that Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control (Studies in Crime and Public Policy).

Paterline, Brent

Zimring, Franklin E. The City that Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control (Studies in Crime and Public Policy). New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xiv + 257 pages. Cloth, $29.95.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, New York City was a dangerous place. Many residents feared riding the subways, hookers and drug dealers dominated Times Square, and city parks became homes to muggers. Crime was rampant, and the police seemed powerless to stop it. In the early 1990s, however, the crime rate in New York City began to drop. Over the next two decades, New York City experienced one of the most dramatic drops in crime in modern history. And while the entire United States witnessed a forty percent drop in crime between 1991 and 2000, New York City was unique in that its' drop in crime was twice as large and lasted twice as long. From 1991 to 2009, New York City's crime rate plummeted by more than eighty percent and was on average thirty percent lower than each of the following cities: Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Franklin E. Zimring's book, The City that Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control, attempts to discern the many possible causes behind this dramatic decline in crime, including gentrification, demographic changes, drug use, economic changes, and incarceration rates. Through a thorough statistical analysis, Zimring, the William C. Simon Professor of Law and Distinguished Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, shows the reader how these "usual suspects" simply cannot account for New York City's drop in crime during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Gentrification, for example, may account for some changes in crime in parts of New York City, but cannot explain the drop throughout the entire city. While gentrification occurred in parts of Manhattan, most neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens were not transformed in a similar fashion, yet crime declined in all three of these boroughs. Similarly, demographic changes cannot fully explain New York City's drop in crime. Zimring's analysis shows that crime rates declined in areas of NewYork City where high-risk minority populations remained stable and where single-parent households exceeded the national average by a wide margin.

Nor do economic factors offer a sole explanation for New York City's drop in crime. There was an economic boom in the late 1990s, but one also occurred in the 1980s, when crime increased. In fact, there was no time between 1990 and 2009 in which New York City's unemployment rate was lower than the national average and there was no time in which rates of poverty could be used as an important factor in explaining New York City's drop in crime. Despite a persistent underclass and a large number of fatherless youth, crime dropped in New York City for nineteen years.

New York City has long had a reputation of being the capital of drug abuse. Despite the city's heroin crisis in the 1970s and the crack epidemic of the mid-1980s, which brought about the so-called "Rockefeller Drug Laws," with mandatory sentences that placed more offenders in prison than ever before. Using a wide variety of data sources, Zimring argues that crime dropped, even as drug use remained stable. Yes, there were some ups and downs in drug use during that nineteen-year period, but even after the crack epidemic of the 1980s faded, New York City's crime rate kept dropping over the next two decades.

Since 1972, the United States has been putting more people in prison for longer periods of time than ever before. During the 1990s, however, the United States and New York City headed in different directions. By 2008, national incarceration rates had increased by sixty-five percent, whereas that in New York City had declined by twenty-eight percent. The ability of the nation's largest city to decrease crime without putting more people in prison is one of the more important findings of this book and should be an important issue in crime control policy discourse.

What was the most important factor in New York City's decline in crime? It turns out that it may have been a change in policing strategies. According to Zimring, there was nothing else spread over the four major boroughs of New York (e.g. population, drug use, economics) that would provide the city with such a big advantage in crime reduction over other major American cities. Changes in policing strategy, including putting more officers on the street, increasing the number of detectives, and using crime analysis and crime mapping to locate "crime hotspots," resulted in the deployment of more resources to these problem areas within the city. The New York Police Department (NYPD) also developed more "aggressive policing" policies that entailed such strategies as "stop and frisks" and more misdemeanor arrests of juveniles. The NYPD also became a more centralized organization, with commanders "enforcing authority." Zimring, however, fails to explain fully how the NYPD became more centralized and does not give examples of how centralization made the department more effective in combating crime.

Zimring does a wonderful job letting the statistics tell the story of New York City's drop in crime, even if he offers little qualitative data to help the reader understand this decline in that city's crime rate on a more personal level. The result is a study that adds much to our knowledge of crime and crime policy while reminding us just how much we still have to learn. Zimring's quantitative approach may prove a little tedious for undergraduate students, but this is nonetheless a superbly written and researched work, and is recommended for all practicing criminologists and graduate students studying in the field.

Brent Paterline, Ph.D.

Professor of Criminal Justice

University of North Georgia

Dahlonega, Georgia