The True Meaning of the Decrease in Crime

Even the most personal experiences can be abstracted into a number. As Stalin once said, “The death of one is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.”

New York is not Soviet Russia, but the rule holds just the same. Last Wednesday, Spectator reported on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement that 2007 saw the lowest homicide rate since crime statistics first became available in 1963. Homicide was down 17 percent from 2006, and violent crime down 5 percent, ahead of the national average of 1.8 percent.

But the true social ramifications of crime are hard to grasp through statistics. Numbers, tables, and pie charts—while lauded by politicians—are of limited use to the people who have to deal with crime personally.

In the two days after Spectator’s article, a string of armed robberies occurred in the Morningside area. Many local store owners expressed concern about a criminal who was, in the words of Bazaar de la Paz owner Carol Puzone, “walking around undetected and [blending] in with the neighborhood.” Bazaar de la Paz was robbed on Jan. 2.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York City’s crime rate has been dropping steadily since 1990. As the crime rate fell, the city began to lose the bad reputation it acquired during the 1970s and 80s. This fact has been lauded by the city’s politicians, most notably former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose presidential campaign Web site states that overall crime fell by 56 percent and homicide by 66 percent during Giuliani’s 1994-2001 tenure as mayor.

But in recent years, Giuliani’s and other local politicians’ thunder has been stolen by those who suggest that the decrease in crime is due to social phenomena far more complex than City Hall’s policies. A much-discussed article by Michael Dobbs in the Washington Post last November noted that New York’s crime drop began four years before Giuliani came into office, and coincided more accurately with national economic growth and the influx of students and immigrants to the city.

Furthermore, the decrease in crime has been linked to gentrification, and has become in the minds of many a sign of the city’s problems, not its accomplishments. In November, controversial comments by author and New York Times contributor John Strausbaugh, as reported on the Times metro blog, indicated a belief among many that crime decreases were a product of the homogenization and commercialization of the city’s culture and the destruction of its diverse landscape, something Strausbaugh described as a “benign ethnic cleansing” of the city’s creative element.

Strasbaugh noted that, while certainly beneficial in itself, reduced crime was a symptom of “a Manhattan that is only a Manhattan of people of money, and only a business Manhattan.”

New York may be coming down with its own version of “Ostalgie”—the term used in Germany for the nostalgia East Germans feel for the old Communist state. Many former “Ossis”—Ost means East in German—regret the economic and social assimilation with the West that has gripped East Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and note that the less dynamic environment of the old state had its advantages.

Will New Yorkers soon feel the same, forgetting the problems of the “old” city’s crime in favor of its cultural vivacity?

zack.hoopes@columbiaspectator.com