第 17 页

was considered a violation of the era’s liberal aesthetic; in others, it was simply

considered too expensive. This 50 percent decline in police translated into a

roughly equal decline in the probability that a given criminal would be caught.

Coupled with the above-cited leniency in the other half of the criminal justice

system, the courtrooms, this decrease in policing created a strong positive

incentive for criminals.

By the 1990s, philosophies—and necessities—had changed. The policing trend

was put in reverse, with wide-scale hiring in cities across the country. Not only

did all those police act as a deterrent, but they also provided the manpower to

imprison criminals who might have otherwise gone uncaught. The hiring of

additional police accounted for roughly 10 percent of the 1990s crime drop.

But it wasn’t only the number of police that changed in the 1990s; consider the

most commonly cited crime-drop explanation of all: innovative policing

strategies.

There was perhaps no more attractive theory than the belief that smart policing

stops crime. It offered a set of bona fide heroes rather than simply a dearth of

villains. This theory rapidly became an article of faith because it appealed to the

factors that, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, most contribute to the

formation of conventional wisdom: the ease with which an idea may be

understood and the degree to which it affects our personal well-being.

The story played out most dramatically in New York City, where newly elected

mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his handpicked police commissioner, William

Bratton, vowed to fix the city’s desperate crime situation. Bratton took a novel

approach to policing. He ushered the NYPD into what one senior police official

later called “our Athenian period,” in which new ideas were given weight over

calcified practices. Instead of coddling his precinct commanders, Bratton

demanded accountability. Instead of relying solely on old-fashioned cop know-

how, he introduced technological solutions like CompStat, a computerized

method of addressing crime hot spots.

The most compelling new idea that Bratton brought to life stemmed from the

broken window theory, which was conceived by the criminologists James Q.

Wilson and George Kelling. The broken window theory argues that minor

nuisances, if left unchecked, turn into major nuisances: that is, if someone breaks

a window and sees it isn’t fixed immediately, he gets the signal that it’s all right

to break the rest of the windows and maybe set the building afire too.

So with murder raging all around, Bill Bratton’s cops began to police the sort of

deeds that used to go unpoliced: jumping a subway turnstile, panhandling too

aggressively, urinating in the streets, swabbing a filthy squeegee across a car’s

windshield unless the driver made an appropriate “donation.”

Most New Yorkers loved this crackdown on its own merit. But they particularly

loved the idea, as stoutly preached by Bratton and Giuliani, that choking off

these small crimes was like choking off the criminal element’s oxygen supply.

Today’s turnstile jumper might easily be wanted for yesterday’s murder. That

junkie peeing in an alley might have been on his way to a robbery.

As violent crime began to fall dramatically, New Yorkers were more than happy

to heap laurels on their operatic, Brooklyn-bred mayor and his hatchet-faced

police chief with the big Boston accent. But the two strong-willed men weren’t

very good at sharing the glory. Soon after the city’s crime turnaround landed

Bratton—and not Giuliani—on the cover of Time, Bratton was pushed to resign.

He had been police commissioner for just twenty-seven months.

New York City was a clear innovator in police strategies during the 1990s crime

drop, and it also enjoyed the greatest decline in crime of any large American city.

Homicide rates fell from 30.7 per 100,000 people in 1990 to 8.4 per 100,000 people

in 2000, a change of 73.6 percent. But a careful analysis of the facts shows that the

innovative policing strategies probably had little effect on this huge decline.

First, the drop in crime in New York began in 1990. By the end of 1993, the rate of

property crime and violent crime, including homicides, had already fallen nearly

20 percent. Rudolph Giuliani, however, did not become mayor—and install

Bratton—until early 1994. Crime was well on its way down before either man

arrived. And it would continue to fall long after Bratton was bumped from office.

Second, the new police strategies were accompanied by a much more significant

change within the police force: a hiring binge. Between 1991 and 2001, the NYPD

grew by 45 percent, more than three times the national average. As argued

above, an increase in the number of police, regardless of new strategies, has been

proven to reduce crime. By a conservative calculation, this huge expansion of

New York’s police force would be expected to reduce crime in New York by 18

percent relative to the national average. If you subtract that 18 percent from New

York’s homicide reduction, thereby discounting the effect of the police-hiring

surge, New York no longer leads the nation with its 73.6 percent drop; it goes

straight to the middle of the pack. Many of those new police were in fact hired by

David Dinkins, the mayor whom Giuliani defeated. Dinkins had been desperate

to secure the law-and-order vote, having known all along that his opponent

would be Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor. (The two men had run against

each other four years earlier as well.) So those who wish to credit Giuliani with

the crime drop may still do so, for it was his own law-and-order reputation that

made Dinkins hire all those police. In the end, of course, the police increase

helped every-one—but it helped Giuliani a lot more than Dinkins.

Most damaging to the claim that New York’s police innovations radically

lowered crime is one simple and often overlooked fact: crime went down

everywhere during the 1990s, not only in New York. Few other cities tried the

kind of strategies that New York did, and certainly none with the same zeal. But

even in Los Angeles, a city notorious for bad policing, crime fell at about the

same rate as it did in New York once the growth in New York’s police force is

accounted for.

It would be churlish to argue that smart policing isn’t a good thing. Bill Bratton

certainly deserves credit for invigorating New York’s police force. But there is

frighteningly little evidence that his strategy was the crime panacea that he and

the media deemed it. The next step will be to continue measuring the impact of

police innovations—in Los Angeles, for instance, where Bratton himself became

police chief in late 2002. While he duly instituted some of the innovations that

were his hallmark in New York, Bratton announced that his highest priority was

a more basic one: finding the money to hire thousands of new police officers.

Now to explore another pair of common crime-drop explanations:

. Tougher gun laws

. Changes in crack and other drug markets

First, the guns. Debates on this subject are rarely coolheaded. Gun advocates

believe that gun laws are too strict; opponents believe exactly the opposite. How

can intelligent people view the world so differently? Because a gun raises a

complex set of issues that change according to one factor: whose hand happens

to be holding the gun.

It might be worthwhile to take a step back and ask a rudimentary question: what

is a gun? It’s a tool that can be used to kill someone, of course, but more

significantly, a gun is a great disrupter of the natural order.

A gun scrambles the outcome of any dispute. Let’s say that a tough guy and a

not-so-tough guy exchange words in a bar, which leads to a fight. It’s pretty

obvious to the not-so-tough guy that he’ll be beaten, so why bother fighting? The

pecking order remains intact. But if the not-so-tough guy happens to have a gun,

he stands a good chance of winning. In this scenario, the introduction of a gun

may well lead to more violence.

Now instead of the tough guy and the not-so-tough guy, picture a high-school

girl out for a nighttime stroll when she is suddenly set upon by a mugger. What

if only the mugger is armed? What if only the girl is armed? What if both are

armed? A gun opponent might argue that the gun has to be kept out of the

mugger’s hands in the first place. A gun advocate might argue that the high-

school girl needs to have a gun to disrupt what has become the natural order: it’s

the bad guys that have the guns. (If the girl scares off the mugger, then the

introduction of a gun in this case may lead to less violence.) Any mugger with

even a little initiative is bound to be armed, for in a country like the United

States, with a thriving black market in guns, anyone can get hold of one.

There are enough guns in the United States that if you gave one to every adult,

you would run out of adults before you ran out of guns. Nearly two-thirds of

U.S. homicides involve a gun, a far greater fraction than in other industrialized

countries. Our homicide rate is also much higher than in those countries. It

would therefore seem likely that our homicide rate is so high in part because

guns are so easily available. Research indeed shows this to be true.

But guns are not the whole story. In Switzerland, every adult male is issued an

assault rifle for militia duty and is allowed to keep the gun at home. On a per

capita basis, Switzerland has more firearms than just about any other country,

and yet it is one of the safest places in the world. In other words, guns do not

cause crime. That said, the established U.S. methods of keeping guns away from

the people who do cause crime are, at best, feeble. And since a gun—unlike a bag

of cocaine or a car or a pair of pants—lasts pretty much forever, even turning off

the spigot of new guns still leaves an ocean of available ones.

So bearing all this in mind, let’s consider a variety of recent gun initiatives to see

the impact they may have had on crime in the 1990s.

The most famous gun-control law is the Brady Act, passed in 1993, which

requires a criminal check and a waiting period before a person can purchase a

handgun. This solution may have seemed appealing to politicians, but to an

economist it doesn’t make much sense. Why? Because regulation of a legal

market is bound to fail when a healthy black market exists for the same product.

With guns so cheap and so easy to get, the standard criminal has no incentive to

fill out a firearms application at his local gun shop and then wait a week. The

Brady Act, accordingly, has proven to be practically impotent in lowering crime.

(A study of imprisoned felons showed that even before the Brady Act, only about

one-fifth of the criminals had bought their guns through a licensed dealer.)

Various local gun-control laws have also failed. Washington, D.C., and Chicago

both instituted handgun bans well before crime began to fall across the country

in the 1990s, and yet those two cities were laggards, not leaders, in the national

reduction in crime. One deterrent that has proven moderately effective is a stiff

increase in prison time for anyone caught in possession of an illegal gun. But

there is plenty of room for improvement. Not that this is likely, but if the death

penalty were assessed to anyone carrying an illegal gun, and if the penalty were

actually enforced, gun crimes would surely plunge.

Another staple of 1990s crime fighting—and of the evening news—was the gun

buyback. You remember the image: a menacing, glistening heap of firearms

surrounded by the mayor, the police chief, the neighborhood activists. It made

for a nice photo op, but that’s about as meaningful as a gun buyback is. The guns

that get turned in are generally heirlooms or junk. The payoff to the gun seller—

usually $50 or $100, but in one California buyback, three free hours of

psychotherapy—isn’t an adequate incentive for anyone who actually plans to use

his gun. And the number of surrendered guns is no match for even the number

of new guns simultaneously coming to market. Given the number of handguns

in the United States and the number of homicides each year, the likelihood that a

particular gun was used to kill someone that year is 1 in 10,000. The typical gun

buyback program yields fewer than 1,000 guns—which translates into an

expectation of less than one-tenth of one homicide per buyback. Not enough, that

is, to make even a sliver of impact on the fall of crime.

Then there is an opposite argument—that we need more guns on the street, but

in the hands of the right people (like the high-school girl above, instead of her

mugger). The economist John R. Lott Jr. is the main champion of this idea. His

calling card is the book More Guns, Less Crime, in which he argues that violent

crime has decreased in areas where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry

concealed weapons. His theory might be surprising, but it is sensible. If a

criminal thinks his potential victim may be armed, he may be deterred from

committing the crime. Handgun opponents call Lott a pro-gun ideologue, and

Lott let himself become a lightning rod for gun controversy. He exacerbated his

trouble by creating a pseudonym, “Mary Rosh,” to defend his theory in online

debates. Rosh, identifying herself as a former student of Lott’s, praised her

teacher’s intellect, his evenhandedness, his charisma. “I have to say that he was

the best professor that I ever had,” s/he wrote. “You wouldn’t know that he was

a ‘right-wing’ ideologue from the class…. There were a group of us students who

would try to take any class that he taught. Lott finally had to tell us that it was

best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to

other ways of teaching graduate material.” Then there was the troubling

allegation that Lott actually in vented some of the survey data that support his

more-guns/less-crime theory. Regardless of whether the data were faked, Lott’s

admittedly intriguing hypothesis doesn’t seem to be true. When other scholars