The Study That Could Upend Everything We Thought We Knew About Declining Urban Crime

Bill Bratton took the job as commissioner of the New York Police Department in 1994 under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, setting the stage for a Cinderella story in urban law enforcement that went on to change how virtually every major U.S. city tackles crime. "He made a vow that he was going to bring down New York crime, he specified a certain amount," says New York University sociologist David Greenberg (that amount: a 40 percent reduction in crime within three years). "And he delivered on that and took credit for the decline."

The story of exactly how that happened has since proliferated, in Bratton’s own accounting, in think tanks celebrating his tactics, in op-eds cementing a popular consensus. During the 1990s, New York City began to deploy a suite of new policing tactics, and – clearly – they worked! The city cracked down on misdemeanors thought to contribute to neglected environments in which felonies then occur (this was the "broken windows" theory of policing popularized, in large part, by The Atlantic). New York rolled out the now-vaunted CompStat computer system designed to better track crime. And stop-and-frisks (a less savory strategy) increased.