NEW YORK MURDER MYSTERY: The True Story Behind the Crime Crash of the 1990s. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, Jan, 2001 by Stephanie Mencimer

NEW YORK MURDER MYSTERY: The True Story Behind the Crime Crash of the 1990s by Andrew Karmen New York University Press, $27.95

DURING THE MID-1990s, I OFTEN found myself spending Saturday nights driving around in a patrol car in sketchy areas of Washington, D.C., taking in the sights with my boyfriend, a D.C. cop. Most of what I saw was a D.C. police department in a shambles. The city was in the midst of a crushing financial crisis, and it had failed to invest in the police department's infrastructure for years.

By 1995, scout cars were dropping wheels, brakes, and mufflers left and fight, and the department couldn't afford to fix them. Station parking' lots were littered with dead and disabled patrol cars, and officers showing up for work often would find that they had nothing to drive. They were using their own money to gas up their cruisers. Neighborhood groups held bake sales to raise money to buy toilet paper, radio batteries, and other critical supplies for local district station houses.

My friend's 4th District station was furnished like a 1950's schoolhouse, full of old desks, wooden chairs, and not much else. Officers used rotary phones--voice mail was unheard of, as were computers. When the station did get a few 486s, most officers didn't know what to do with them. They didn't have e-mail, and there was no central network for filing reports. All the crime reports were done by hand, on paper, and later sent to headquarters for processing.

The D.C. cops' crime fighting tactics weren't much more sophisticated. Officers would pace from one crime scene to another in response to radio calls, doing very little in the way of proactive policing. I was amazed they ever caught any criminals--and most of them didn't. Ten percent of the officers made 90 percent of the department's arrests.

In the midst of all the chaos, after work my cop friend and his buddies would sit around a pitcher of beer at the Fraternal Order of Police clubhouse and talk shop. Their conversations frequently turned to the other police departments around the country that they considered real police departments. Number one on their list was the NYPD.

To D.C. cops, the New York Police Department was the shit. It had Compstat, the state-of-the-art technology system that connected all the various districts to headquarters and allowed precinct commanders to call up maps showing the latest crime trends on their beats, helping them shut down trouble spots before they got out of hand. New York also had William Bratton, the famed former transit cop chief who had cleaned up the New York subway system by applying the "broken window" theory to policing.

The broken window theory was coined by criminologist George Kelling, who had shown that neighborhoods that neglected little things like broken windows and litter invited more serious criminal activity into their midst.

Consequently, Bratton encouraged transit cops to crack down on small crimes, like turnstile jumping and panhandling, based on the belief that people who commit minor crimes also commit serious ones. The practice seemed to work beautifully, and Bratton became something of a celebrity. He became the NYPD police commissioner in 1994, and the number of murders in the city plummeted by almost 800 the next year. Suddenly other cities, including D.C., were clamoring to implement their own Bratton systems.

Naturally, he was happy to promote his ideas. (In 1996, Giuliani pushed Bratton out and the former commissioner took his act on the road as a consultant.) In 1998, Bratton wrote a memoir called Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic, taking credit for New York's 10 percent annual crime rate drops for the two years he served as commissioner. Jack Maple, the gourmand cop in a bow tie and derby who served as Bratton's deputy, also wrote his own book in 1999 (called The Crime Fighter: Putting the Bad Guys Out of Business) claiming the lion's share of the credit for the New York crime drop.

Conservatives, too, jumped on the bandwagon, eager to declare New York proof positive that their law-and-order theories were valid, and that liberals' belief that such mushy things as alleviating poverty could reduce crime were intellectually bankrupt.

The funny thing, though, was that New York wasn't the only place the crime rate was falling; a similar phenomenon was taking place in D.C. Despite the sorry state of D.C.'s police force, the number of murders in the city fell from 482 in 1991 to 260 in 1998. That coincidence didn't keep the New York police brass from taking credit for turning the city around, though.

It was their claims--and the doubt cast on them by cities like D.C.--that prompted criminologist Andrew Karmen to take a closer look at New York City's 1990's "Crime Crash." In his new book, New York Murder Mystery, Karmen, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, deconstructs New York's falling murder rate, working under the old premise that "Politicians use statistics like drunks use lamp posts: for support, not illumination."