New York’s Crime Drop Puzzle: Introduction to the Special Issue

The best research, it has been said, seeks to solve puzzles. New York City’s dramatic crime decline over the last two decades is a real brainteaser. No one predicted it and, as yet, no one has explained it, at least to the satisfaction of most social scientists who study crime trends. We might think that a puzzle of this magnitude and consequence – a 75% decline in street crime in one of the world’s leading cities in just twenty years – would attract the attention of legions of researchers, eager to take on this Rubik’s Cube of applied social science. But surprisingly few have risen to the challenge and the best existing research has made New York’s crime drop even more puzzling.

That is the backdrop to this special issue. Researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and elsewhere secured support from the Open Society Foundations (OSF) to identify key research issues related to the New York crime drop. A steering committee was established to guide the project and commission research papers. The papers were presented at a two-day conference, Understanding the Crime Decline in New York, held at John Jay College in September, 2011. The six papers and three comments in this special issue are revised versions of presentations given at the conference.¹

The papers in this special issue by no means exhaust the many important research questions prompted by the New York crime drop, nor does the larger group of papers commissioned for the OSF project. The New York puzzle remains unsolved. But the papers and comments herein offer many suggestive leads for future research. The special issue will have accomplished its primary purpose if it provokes expanded and sustained research attention to crime trends in New York and elsewhere.

The article by Eric Baumer and Kevin Wolff puts the New York crime trends in comparative perspective. New York’s crime drop, they argue, must be placed in the context of comparable declines in other U. S. cities and cross-national crime trends. In her comment Lauren Krivo agrees and calls for increased attention to the role of neighborhood d in explaining changing crime rates and to trends in white-collar and state crimes that have received relatively little attention from researchers.

Min Xie also compares New York with other cities, not with respect to trends in crime but in the reporting of criminal victimization to the police. Xie finds that New Yorkers are less likely to report crimes to the police than the residents of other large U. S. cities. This result, by itself, could be used to support criticisms of coercive or discriminatory policing practices in New York that erode trust in the police. But Xie also discovers that New Yorkers are far less likely than in the past, and less likely than the residents of the comparison cities, to fail to report crime because the “police wouldn’t help,” a rough measure of trust or confidence in the police. This finding fits less easily in the narrative of deteriorating police-community relations in New York and offers yet another puzzle for future research.

The big research puzzle in the New York crime drop is the role of the police. There is no question that the New York Police Department has undergone major changes in recent decades, as Michael White documents in his article. Police and city officials have attributed New York’s crime drop largely to the adoption of more effective enforcement strategies, including the “order-maintenance” strategies of the 1990s and the “stop, question, and frisk” program during the last decade. Yet, with few exceptions, prior research referenced throughout the special issue has provided little support for these claims. In the most comprehensive assessment to date, Zimring (2012) assigns a large measure of the responsibility for New York’s crime drop to the police, but mainly through a process of elimination: the police must have played an important role because it appears nothing else did.

The article by Richard Rosenfeld and Robert Fornango reports that increases in police stops have not reduced robbery and burglary rates in New York police precincts. They point to several limitations of their study and Baumer raises additional concerns in his comment. One important limitation is the use of New York’s large and heterogeneous police precincts as units of analysis in research on police enforcement practices. Cody Telep, David Weisburd, and Brian Lawton make a strong case for investigating the impact of police stops on crime using much smaller units of spatial aggregation. Their article presages future research on the crime impacts of police stops and related practices that incorporates the principles and procedures of evaluations of “hot spots” enforcement strategies.

The special issue closes with an expert primer on studying crime trends by David Greenberg. David McDowall’s comment augments Greenberg’s instruction with the important proviso that understanding the process generating the trend is a necessary precondition for evaluating the plausibility of substantive explanations – and the longer the trend the better for getting the process right.

This brings us full circle in prompting new research on New York’s crime drop. Three strategic lessons emerge from the contributions to this special issue. Future research should go wide by putting New York in comparative context, nationally and internationally; it should go long by putting New York’s recent experience in historical context; and it should develop a strong ground game by investigating the temporal changes across multiple spatial units, down to the street segment. We encourage our colleagues to join us in pursuing these strategies for addressing the continuing puzzle of New York’s crime drop.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Rosenfeld

Richard Rosenfeld is Curators Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. His research interests include crime trends, crime statistics, and criminological theory. His current research focuses on the impact of policing on crime rates. He was Principal Investigator on the project, Understanding the New York City Crime Decline.

Karen Terry

Karen Terry is Professor of Criminal Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Her research focuses primarily on sex offender treatment, management and supervision, and she was recently the principal investigator for two national studies on sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests. She was Co-PI on the project, Understanding the New York City Crime Decline.

Preeti Chauhan

Preeti Chahaun is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Her research interests include the intersection of neighborhood and individual level risk factors for antisocial behavior, psychopathology, and victimization, with an emphasis on understanding their contribution to racial disparities. She was Project Manager on the project, Understanding the New York City Crime Decline.

Notes

1. The papers, accompanying comments, and author and steering committee biographical sketches are available at http://www.jjay.cuny.edu/academics/4884.php. We acknowledge the additional support of the Public Welfare Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies for this project.