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

Washington Monthly, Jan, 2001 by Stephanie Mencimer

Karmen is no stranger to the crime reduction controversy. His refusal to validate the claims made by folks like Bratton and Maple earned him the scorn of much of the New York media--which relished quoting him so others could bash him as an outdated, soft-on-crime liberal. Karmen's background as a campus antiwar activist in the 1960s made him an easy target. At one point, the editorial board of the New York Post railed against the "Andrew Karmens of the world, who seem to believe that `social forces' or lunar cycles or some such nonsense, are the most important factors affecting crime."

The debate over New York's crime reduction is similar to the debate currently underway about who is responsible for the economic boom. There are so many possible variables, each loaded with political overtones. But one by one, Karmen picks apart the various assertions that have been used to explain the "outbreak of better behavior that swept across the City" in the last half on the 1990s. He debunks the overwhelming majority of them.

Karmen starts by examining the murders themselves, looking for patterns to explain who was no longer being killed when the body count dropped. Here, you won't be surprised to learn, he deduces that most of New York's killers are not serial killers or child abductors but poor, young black men, as are their victims, and that a good number of the murders are drug-related.

He then examines the changes at work within the NYPD. Karmen quickly refutes the notion that Compstat and the management changes that came with it could have accounted for such a quick and steep drop in crime. The crime rates in New York were already falling before the system was implemented.

Before finishing the book, I would have bet that Karmen would identify the booming economy as responsible for the crime drop, but he doesn't. Looking at data from the Census Bureau and other sources, Karmen finds that poverty actually intensified in black and Hispanic neighborhoods at the same time the body counts fell substantially.

Karmen also discounts another theory in vogue right now, which attributes the nation's crime drop to the huge number of people the U.S. has put behind bars over the past decade. New York also has not led the country in either its incarceration rate or prison expansion. Even when its inmate population did grow during the late 1970s and late 1980s, the crime rates did not fall.

So you're thinking, if it's not the incarceration rate and it's not the economy, it had to be the waning crack epidemic, right? But Karmen puts the kabosh on that idea as well, with data showing that the crack epidemic declined as much in Philadelphia as it did in New York without producing the same effect on the murder rate. And the overall proportion of New York arrestees with cocaine and heroin in their systems did not dramatically decline during the 1990s. Drug overdose deaths diminished, but hospital emergency room episodes increased, and the police continued to make large numbers of drug arrests throughout the decade--evidence, Karmen suggests, that New York's drug trade continued to thrive even while the murder rate was plummeting.