The Golden Age of Crime Reduction Is Now

If you didn’t know better, you would think we were living in the blood-soaked Dark Ages. The New York City tabloids scream — though, to be fair, they do not know an “inside voice” — “Shot to Pieces,” “City Out of Control,” “Random Assaults Hit City.” Each one is a staccato direction: “Run for the hills.” And indeed, the flight from New York is a perennial theme — the billionaires, the Black middle class, the tech bros. Yet New York City is still standing.

So how bad is it? Should we fold our tents and sit upon the ground telling sad stories of the death of cities? Not to invoke a now dishonored word, but, please, some “context.”

Crime in New York City, and across the nation, is at one of the lowest points in our history. One of us, John Roman, has examined the rates of crime over decades. The release of the first quarter of 2024 preliminary FBI statistics shows the homicide rate in the United States, as of April 1, 2024, is 4.5 per 100,000. For comparison, the homicide rate was 6.8 per 100,000 at the peak of the pandemic and 5.1 per 100,000 at the beginning of the pandemic.

The violent crime rate for the first quarter of 2024 was 323.6 per 100,000, which is the lowest violent crime rate in 55 years, since 1969.

The golden age is now, and two forces promise further progress to come: the structure of how great cities work, and a dawning recognition that the causes of crime are many, so the solutions must be too. It is not that crime must be low for a city to work, but that a city must work for crime to be low.

Of course, we will always worry about safety. It is the foundation of a thriving life. But as Steven Pinker has documented meticulously in “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” over the broad sweep of history, humankind has experienced a remarkable and seemingly ineluctable decline in violence. Today, fewer than one in 200 people experience a violent trauma each year — whereas in the Levant BCE, roughly the area referred to as the Middle East today, that risk was 40 to 80 times higher.

Over the last 50 years, the debate over what makes us safe has largely zeroed in on the role of police. Police matter, but the broader sweep of history signals that we did not get from the Levant BCE to New York City today simply on the strength of police deployment.

Jane Jacobs, in considering what makes a city work, analogized to the development of scientific thinking from one concerned with how two elements work on one another to something more complicated. The life sciences, and, she argued, cities themselves “do not exhibit one problem … which if understood explains all. They can be analyzed into many such problems or segments which … are also related with one another. The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are ‘interrelated into an organic whole.’”

Explanations for how cities work, like explanations for scientific phenomena or explanations for why crime goes up or down, are problems of “organized complexity.” Why is this insight at all helpful? Because “it tells us that problems of this kind can be analyzed,” and not just considered “‘in some dark foreboding way, irrational.’” (Emphasis in original.)

The variation in crime rates among cities — a variation masked by the overall downward national trend — can tell a lot about how well a city works. Some cities have experienced extraordinary improvements: New York City, Dallas and Los Angeles, all three once among the most dangerous big cities in America, have evolved to the point where they mentor less successful cities. But others — Baltimore, Milwaukee, Memphis — have slowly spiraled to a hard landing.

Issues of structure, governance and pure geography can undergird whether a city improves or not. Segregation can mark a city and crowd disadvantage into some quarters, making it harder and harder to find opportunity. Barriers to opportunity can be as literal as a highway bisecting a city; concentrations of lead at appallingly high rates in poor neighborhoods depress school achievement. Population decline, the loss of a tax base, the inability to manage a police force to solve crimes — all are pieces of the intricate puzzles that make up crime rises and falls. And there are also policies and operations that strengthen cities — for example, immigration. Places that have welcomed large numbers of people from other countries seem to have been more successful in reducing crime and violence, since foreign-born people commit crimes less often than native-born people. There are dozens of explanations for the crime decline of the 1990s, but what they have in common is that these forces are concentrated on the people and in the places that are at greatest risk.

We are getting better at acting on the insight that cities are problems of organized complexity and that controlling crime maps onto that complexity. Police remain an important component in both reducing crime and increasing safety. But the mix is more complicated than just “to control crime, send in the police.” In its simplest iteration, there is a growing understanding that just because police are first on the scene doesn’t mean they should be. Mental health crises, for instance, might be best responded to by police plus mental health professionals, or by civilians alone. A gun and a badge do not magically equip police officers with the skills to make parents better caregivers, to help a person dealing with substance abuse, to navigate contact with a person with disabilities.

If reducing crime is really just about managing risk and controlling behavior, there are many ways to do that — some of which are twofers: They improve urban life in some other way at the same time that they reduce harm. For example, randomized controlled trials in New York City housing projects show that lighting reduces nighttime felony crime by 36% — not in a generation, but right now. Other high-quality evidence shows that remediating buildings, providing enhanced summer youth employment, tutoring algebra in ninth grade and many other efforts have a significant and sustained impact on crime and the quality of urban life. There is opportunity here: It is as if we have been using only 10% of our brains to solve a problem when there is a whole wide world of solutions out there.

Those solutions appear in many places, even if we haven’t yet given this approach a name or identified a clear way to organize their deployment. Shared spaces in challenged neighborhoods can be rejuvenated and reimagined, with blight giving way to beautification. Bullying can be made less welcome in schools; bars and liquor stores catering to bad behavior can become less common; and bad landlords can face increasing scrutiny. We have invested billions into security devices that make our homes harder to burglarize, stores more difficult to rob and cars harder to steal.

There has been a growing recognition that problems in people’s inner lives and most intimate relationships are worth public investment. There is far more urgency in improving the care given to victims of crime, and that trauma is acknowledged and treated. A multitude of medications are now widely available to treat anxiety, depression and psychosis that were once only treated in institutions and jails. And in many states — particularly states with cities that have seen reduced violence — the expansion of Medicaid has facilitated even greater access to these life-changing drugs to the highest-risk group of all, young men with limited means.

So why don’t more people believe that things are getting better? The last four years have unleashed existential terrors — threats of unstoppable disease, massive unemployment. And just as these threats were vanquished, new terrors arose — specifically, real and spiraling inflation. We know from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that people are risk averse, specifically that people fear losing things of value much more than the benefits of gaining something of the same value. So, when a never-heard-of-before virus combines with catastrophic economic and social loss, it will take time to readjust.

All of this comes on top of the dramatic changes in Americans’ perceptions about crime that were activated by 9/11, the most notable event since New York City crime began its decline in 1990. In the post-9/11 world, our vulnerability was and continues to be broadcast endlessly. “See something, say something,” government told us for more than a decade: Maintain vigilance and be aware that the risk of a terrorist attack is elevated. The effect on crime rates of this mindset has probably been negligible, but the effect on our perceived risk of being victimized has been significant. Gallup annually asks Americans if crime is getting worse in their local area and if it is getting worse in the U.S. as a whole. The gap was 15 points in 2000 and 13 points in 2001 — and it has never been that small since. By 2020, 38% of Americans reported that crime in their area was getting worse but 78% said it was getting worse across the U.S. We were told to be afraid, and we are.

How do we close the gap? It may come down to language and operations. We do not yet have a way to reframe the debate in terms of creating more assets — one that would make “turn on the lights” feel as powerful and compelling as “send in the police.” Broken windows was powerful because it conjured and organized an approach to policing that directed their mobilization. What is the equivalent rallying cry for organizing the complexity of urban life and deploying civic resources?

Americans are moving on from 9/11 and the pandemic, ever so slowly, but definitely moving on. As we move away from fearful times, we will be less buffeted by emotion and more open to accepting the facts as they are. Those facts lead us to look to government as a force for alignment rather than a catch-all for unsolvable problems. The lessons of the last generation are that a criminal system that lightens its touch and reduces its footprint can focus on interventions that synchronize with the forces that make cities vibrant, rather than treating crime and justice as a separate problem.

So are things perfect? Of course not. But we are in a so much better place now than 10, 20, 50, 100 and 2,500 years ago. The problems, and their complexity, are coming into focus. And even if we have not completely mastered them, we have learned slowly how to tame ourselves and, most importantly, to strengthen informal connections, the most powerful if inchoate force that keeps us safe. That effort is at the center of the whole human project: to live productively and peaceably together.