5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Loyd and Antone should read more carefully, January 29, 2012
This review is from: The City that Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control (Studies in Crime and Public Policy) (Hardcover)
Loyd seems to have missed Table 1.5, which supplies the data supporting Zimring's textual notation that LA had a remarkable post-2000 surge in rate of decline for major crimes, and also shows that LA's accomplishment still fell short of that for NYC in that SAME post-2000 interval.
Antone, on the other hand, seems to have entirely missed the last section of Appendix C in which Zimring discusses the methods used to verify declines in homicide and other major crime rates in spite of the fact that police reports of crime may be flawed by inherent conflicts of interest.
This is an immensely complex and extensively documented book. Its central thesis, that brutally high crime rates are NOT a necessary feature of life in large urban centers in 21st century America, is very well documented.
But be warned, this book's documentation and sophisticated statistical analyses are tough going. It deserves, and repays careful, critical and repeated reading. The novelty and hopeful character of its conclusions would warrant a steady climb in readership.
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5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, but Puzzling -, December 29, 2011
This review is from: The City that Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control (Studies in Crime and Public Policy) (Hardcover)
This book is a much longer version of an article title 'How New York Beat Crime' in Scientific American, 8/2011, that reports on New York City's largest and longest sustained drop in street crime. Rates of homicide, robbery and burglary dropped by more than 80%; by 2009 the homicide rate was lower than in 1961, the risk of being robbed was less than one sixth its 1990 level, and the risk of car theft had declined to one sixteenth. The city's experience has shown many of our assumptions about crime are wrong, including that lowering crime requires first tackling poverty, unemployment and drug use, and that it requires throwing many people in jail.
The first nine years of its crime decline were part of a broader national trend - a drop of nearly 40% that began in the early 1990s and ended in 2000. New York went from being in the middle of New York, Houston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and L.A. to the lowest of the five - more than 30% lower than the next best city. NYPDs data are corroborated by county health department data of all deaths, as well as insurance claim data. Victim surveys confirmed the dip in both robberies and burglaries.
The percentage of the population in the most arrest-prone age bracket (15-29) declined at essentially the same rate as nationally, and economic growth was not a factor. In the most populous boroughs (Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx), diversity did not drop (it did in Manhattan) - yet, crime went way down, at comparable rates, in all four of those boroughs. At the same time, drug use appears to have stayed relatively stable, per overdose deaths, hospitalizations for drug treatment, urine tests of criminal suspects.
As for incarcerations - the rate rose during 1990-97, but only 15%, and then fell. By 2008 it was 28% < 1990 rate, vs. nationally, being up 65%. The rate former New York prisoners ere reconvicted because of a felony three years after release increased during the late 1980s, but fell 64% after 1990.
Beginning in 1990, the city added over 7,000 cops and made its efforts more aggressive and focused. After 2000, it cut the force by more than 4,000.
Instead of emphasizing 'broken-windows' policing of marginal neighborhoods, police emphasized 'hotspots.' CompStat began in 1994.
Finally, the New York Times (12/30,2011) reported current problems with and an on-going investigation of police not reporting crimes and underclassifying crimes.
The problem I have with the book is that in it the author contends that while the average large U.S. city's crime declined around 40% between 1991-2000, New York's decline continued and amounted to twice as much overall, while the decline stopped elsewhere. However, his Table 1.4 shows L.A., Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit as also reporting across-the-board declines in all reported categories between 2000-09; San Diego would also be included in that group but for the robbery category, in which it had no decline. Thus, this makes the author's efforts to explain New York City's 'unique' continued decline fallacious. The book, however, was interesting.
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3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Too bad the author didn't know about this news article before writing his book, January 8, 2012
This review is from: The City that Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control (Studies in Crime and Public Policy) (Hardcover)
The author should read the article in the New York Times by Al Baker and Joseph Goldstein (December 30, 2011) entitled: "NYPD Leaves Offenses Unrecorded to Keep Crime Numbers Down." The article contains a lot of anecdotal examples and some interesting quotes:
"Crime victims in New York sometimes struggle to persuade the police to write down what happened on an official report. The reasons are varied. Police officers are often busy, and few relish paperwork. But in interviews, more than half a dozen police officers, detectives and commanders also cited departmental pressure to keep crime statistics low. . . . "For police officers," he added, "it's gotten to the point of what's the most diplomatic way to discourage a crime report from being taken." Some public officials have said they have received more complaints from constituents that their reports of crime were not being recorded. State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn said his office had to contact "local precincts directly to make sure that criminal complaints were filed and processed appropriately." . . . subtle tweaks in police protocol offer opportunities to avoid taking reports. In 2009, the department came up with a new policy that might seem inconsequential: Robbery victims would have to go to the station house to give their reports directly to a detective or patrol supervisor. . . . "A police report wouldn't get made because they make you wait in the police station for hours," one commander said. Eventually, he added, the crime victim would give up and leave."
The article contains a very long list of examples of the NYPD deliberately underreporting felonies and misdemeanors.
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