The City That Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control

Zimring (The Great American Crime Decline), law professor at Berkeley, illustrates how far New York City’s crime rate has plummeted since its peak in the late 1980s–early 1990s. He argues that the decline “challenges the major assumptions that have dominated American crime and drug policy for more than a generation”—that the New York Police Department’s implementation of assertive policing policies is the sole reason for the decline. Other factors, he persuasively demonstrates, such as demographic changes, aging populations, changes in parole policy can take credit as well. While Zimring does introduce several new perspectives on the crime decline—contradicting, for example, that a cause of the decline was gentrification—his book’s scholarly tone, intense focus, and abundant detail might prove hard going for readers not steeped in the study of statistics and urban crime. (Nov.)