Restoring Public Safety

By Rafael A. Mangual

New York was the site of what was surely one of the most significant government-led achievements in urban American history: a steep drop in serious violent crime, continuing across a 25-year period from the early 1990s well into the second decade of the 21st century. As of 1990, New York State’s violent crime and murder rates per 100,000 residents had reached 1,180.9 and 14.5, respectively. By 2015, those measures had plummeted to 379.7 and 3.1—respective declines of 68% and 79%. The statewide reduction in criminal violence was concentrated in New York City, which had accounted for nearly 87% of the 2,605 murders reported to the FBI by New York State in 1990. Then as now, violent crime was significantly concentrated within small slices of the city’s neighborhoods, whose black and Latino residents benefited most from the decline. As crime plummeted, New York City blossomed. Over the course of a single decade, the once crime-ridden, under-developed city depicted in gritty vigilante and gangster movies—whose northern-most borough was infamously observed in flames by horrified viewers of the 1977 World Series—rebranded itself as the safest big city in America. In recent years, however, the previously steady decline in violent crime in New York has ground to a halt—and even begun to reverse. An uptick in violent crime, concentrated in the state’s urban centers and accelerating during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, constitutes perhaps the most serious challenge for policymakers. Successfully meeting that challenge and addressing those concerns will require an understanding of what lies at the root of the problem.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2022. 15p.