It looks like the New York City city council has finally decided that they’ve had enough of Mayor Bloomberg’s Stop and Frisk policy. With veto-proof majorities they have passed one bill to create an Inspector General and one bill that “expands the definition of racial profiling and allows people who believe they have been profiled to sue police in state court.” Bloomberg says he will veto both bills, but he can’t prevent an override of his vetoes.
I doubt it matters legally or morally, but I wonder if it’s possible to estimate how effective this draconian policy has been in lessening the incidence of violent crime in the city. Among the 33 cities in the country with a population over 500,000, New York city ranks third-safest, trailing only El Paso, Texas and San Diego, California. By contrast, Philadelphia ranks as the fourth most dangerous, ahead of only Memphis, Baltimore, and Detroit. The turnaround in New York’s crime rate began in the 1990’s, during Mayor Giuliani’s terms in office, and it’s reflective of a nationwide decline in violent crime that has many possible explanations. Some think that removing lead from the environment could be a major cause. I really don’t know.
But I think New Yorkers have tolerated tough on crime policies, even when they clearly violate the 4th Amendment, because they seem to be working.
For whatever reason, that tolerance seems to have come to an end.
“Tough on crime” became police harassment with impunity. Too many cases of “walking in a good neighborhood while black” that did not result in seriously deterrent disciplinary action caused a backlash.
I have to wonder whether the drugwar crap caused some of the backlash. Nobody’s much interested in seeing “justice” for somebody carrying MJ, but that has to be where most of the “success” of the program came from.
BooMan,
If you’re white and live in NYC, “Stop and frisk” is probably more than all right.
But ask the minorities who live there.
I’m pretty damn sure they’ll have a different song to sing.
And it might be one thing, if the cops let small things like a small amount of pot go, and not arrest the poor person who was carrying it.
But too often, they don’t. And another poor kid goes into the “justice” system, only to be eaten up.
I moved out of the city right in the middle of the Rudy years, and I couldn’t stand his Police State tactics – and I was a 30-something white guy.
I haven’t live there in a long time, so maybe I shouldn’t say anything, but I’m one of those people who think that there should be NO ‘stopping,” and NO ‘frisking,’ without probable cause.
Also, abortion rights have been linked to the fall in crime rates. Women who control their fertility are less likely to have unwanted children, and children who have been unloved and abused are the richest source for criminals and sociopaths years later.
Hey they deserve it, we all know the government is subsidizing the poor lifestyle with massive budget busting entitlements.
I have to wonder whether the drugwar crap caused some of the backlash. Nobody’s much interested in seeing “justice” for some kid carrying MJ, but that has to be where most of the “success” of the program came from. I also wonder if the increased police presence itself might have had some deterrent effect. Too bad local governments can’t just boost police presence without resorting to some grandstanding crap like stop & frisk.
Computer crashed — sorry for the partial dupe above.
Demographic shifts also lowered crime. Time and again, around the globe and through history when there have been a relative drop in the percentage of the population that is under 25 the crime rate drops.
Bernie Kerik did rationalize the way the NYPD conducted police work to more directly go after the sources of crime and it was pretty smart.
Stop and frisk, not so much.
Cities are dynamic like that. Here in DC back in the 90’s we were the murder capital of the US. The crime rate was fucking insane.
We tolerated all sorts of crazy shit to try and bring it back down. People were in the streets demanding it and cursing out the cops. It was really something.
We fixed it by gentrifying everyone out of DC and spiking the cost of rent so only educated and affluent could move in. Declared the problem fixed (we moved all the riff raff into SE and PGC) declared the problem fixed and then started getting mad at the cops for doing what we asked them to before.
It correlates pretty well.
The whole topic of crime rates provides enough information for dozens of disserations on how people misuse statistics.
It’s the classic problem of confusing chronology with causation. “Giuliani got tough on crime and it went down” or “California passed 3 strikes and crime went down”. The fact that crime rates were going to go down anyway in both of those places is easy to overlook. The worst misusers of crime statistics are the death penalty advocates, because the statistical evidence actually shows a small but statistically-significant correlation between the death penalty and higher violent crime.
The good news is that there is an incredibly rich set of statistical crime rate data available across all of the first world broken down by locality. You can use this to check for correlations of almost anything you like.
Of course, even that can be misused by those who aren’t versed in the topic. The hit-and-run economists who wrote Freakonomics did this when they came up with the supposed high abortion rate – low crime rate link. Of course that got lots of publicity. But like almost everything else in their two books, when their results were examined they fell apart, starting with the problem of linking abortion rates in a locality to crime rates 18 years later in the same locality, given high population mobility. In fact it was an accidental coorelation based on similar factors in the localities.
Over time criminologists generally found 4 main factors in crime rates: economy/unemployment; percentage of the population that was of the high crime demographic (male, ages 16-24); economic stratification; and racial/ethnic homogenaity. These factors never combined to explain fully the crime rates as witnessed but they were pretty good at predicting what was to come.
Thus, the great fall in crime rates in American cities in the 1990s was predictable based on the aging of the baby boomlet kids and the improving economy – regardless of how many draconian anti-crime bills were or were not passed in each of those cities during that time.
But even with all that there was a general problem of some unexplained variable that seemed to have pushed crime upwards until sometime in the 1980s (varied by locality) then downwards after that.
As Boo mentioned, recent research into the link between atmospheric lead and crime rates has provide the missing variable, with an almost perfect correlation of the portion of the crime rate that had previously been unexplained. Lead was introduced as an “anti-knock” component of gasoline early on in the automotive age and as cars burned gasoline lead would be in the air everyone would breathe for on average many years.
Cars had been becoming an increasing part of society in the first half of the 20th century, but most people didn’t have them and those who did used them almost exclusively for local errands, thus they were driven for far fewer miles than a typical car is today. This all changed in the aftermath of WW2. The post-war homes of the late 1940s practically had to have a garage, and by the 1950s parent advice books were saying that every teen had to have his/her own car. 1 in 7 jobs in the US was related to the auto industry. Expressways and suburbs meant that commutes of 12k+ miles annually were common as were cross-country car trips – as cars began to replace trains as the main method for long distance travel.
All this meant a dramatic increase in the lead content of breathable air.
Meanwhile, as far back as the 1950s the negative effects of lead on the human mind were suspected and many key studies were published in the 1960s. This mostly had to do with ingested lead – like from kids eating peeling paint. Legally lead would be banned from products like paint but apparently no one thought about gasoline.
They did think about other serious pollution problems with gasoline and that led to a mandate of phasing in catalytic converters for all cars, but those converters stopped working after a short time due to the lead in the gasoline – so unleaded was introduced.
Importantly for our statistical analysis the timing and speed of the phasing in of unleaded gasoline varied greatly from locale to local. The US was the first in the early 1970s, with France (of course) being the last in western Europe in 1988. But the US phase in was slow – leaded gas was cheaper, not all cars were required to have catalytic converters at first, and people resisted. Other countries changed much faster.
So, looking back now we can look at the lead-air content in various localities at different points in time, factor in that it takes some time for inhaled lead to build a critical mass in a human system to start to affect behaviors, and compare the crime rates in those localities over time with the lead rates.
The coorelation is astounding. And this has been repeated by many follow-up studies. The NYC subway of Bernard Goetz’ day in the mid-1980s doesn’t exist anymore because the people who lived in NYC during those years had all been breathing leaded air all their lives and it caused a significant change in behaviors.
There are many lessons here, in addition to the ones about misunderstanding and misusing statistics. The most important lesson to me is that when you pump a shitload of bad chemicals into the environment very bad consequences are likely to happen even if you won’t figure out the link for (literally) a century after you started doing it. So it’s better not do to it at the outset.
When I first read about some of the more recent lead studies – there was one I think from Johns Hopkins that looked at multiple countries and found the same trends even in Scandinavia – it certainly made sense. Lead has serious effects on the part of the brain associated with inhibitions and self control.
But as you say, there are other factors too. What doesn’t seem to be convincing is that anything Giuliani/Bloomberg has done is having any effect at all. I have a bad feeling, though, that over the next few years all the lives damaged by stop and frisk will start to add up, and trends may change.
El Paso is safe? I had a friend that went back to school, got his law degree from Austin and became an ADA in El Paso. He sounded like it was the crime capitol of the world, with several attempts on his own life from gangs who are knee deep in drug and human trafficking.
To understand why the crime rate went down, you have to understand why it went up. There was a large, extended rise in the violent crime rate in this country that began in the 1960s and ended in the mid-1990s. I think it’s worth considering this as an event, with a cause or causes, that came to an end for reasons having to do with the amelioration of those causes.
My pet theory is urban renewal – the ripping down of neighborhoods, and the disruption that causes, and the imposition of monstrous, anti-human public housing projects. The deflection points on the chart come a decade or so after the beginning and end of that sorry phase in American history.
This chart (pdf), if you want to see the trend.
http://www.ricknevin.com/uploads/USA_Murder_Rate_at_Historic_Record_Low.pdf
How does your pet theory explain the similar rise and fall in violent crime rates in other countries?
That style of urban renewal was common throughout the western democracies in the post-war period, although for many, the demolition phase had already been taken care of.