New York New York

The achievements of the NYPD under Governor Pataki and Rudy Guiliani and others have been nothing short of astonishing. Take a look at these statistics here. . Per 100,000 head of population their rape figures are about 25 per 100,000 compared to our 35 odd, and they have acheived a 36% reduction since 1993.

Their assault rate has been cut by 37%, and is now at 323 per 100, 000 a third of ours more or less. Burglary has been cut by a spectacular 62%, and is at about 478 per 100,00. Ours is around 2300-2400... Their rates of robbery and murder, although still higher than ours, has been cut by 62% and 65% respectively since 1994, and are still dropping fast.

what is stopping us from achieving the same results here?

The question that needs to be asked now is what is stopping us from achieving the same results here, with the accompanying renewed sense of community and personal safety. As recently as the early 1990's, New York was considered to be a complete basketcase, Hell on Earth, with a crime rate worse than many Third World countries. If in 1993 someone had predicted these figures for the year 2001, they would have been written off as being a dreamer or of questionable sanity.

In the early 1990's, New York was not only crime ridden, but also in serious financial difficulties. Yet, despite all these problems, they did it. If it could be done in New York, it can be done here. Or anywhere.

The mayor, Rudy Giuliani has claimed much of the credit, but others (such as the policy's architect William Bratton and Governor Patiki) should also take credit. Not all of Giuliani's policies have been as successful, or sensible. His attempts at censorship for example.

What's also interesting is that most of those responsible for New York's law and order policy are from fairly recent immigrant stock themselves. They have not forgotten what it is like to struggle, and then lose it to some lowlife.

there are costs associated with allowing crime to continue at its current levels

This government would be wise to take heed of the lessons to be learnt from this success story and others like it. For a start, they could reverse the recent trend of downsizing police numbers. This will incur increased costs, but with gains like this to be had as a result, it needs to be tried. After all there are costs associated with allowing crime to continue at its current levels, particularly crimes such as rape.

Undeniably there is another highly desirable side effect of the New York approach that is often noted in the stories to follow - that of a much improved quality of life. By cleaning up not only crime, but all the other problems on the streets, stress levels for the average New Yorker have been greatly reduced. This too would be very welcome here, especially in Auckland.

The following is a quote from the Herald story here.

"NEW YORK - A block or so to the south of Macy's department store, purported site of the original miracle on 34th St, is another scene of genuine joy and wonder.

It's a triangular traffic island that sits in the middle of Herald Square at the confluence of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, which slices diagonally across the length of Manhattan from west to east.

Just a few short years ago, the plot of cement and bitumen was much like every other public space in this city, except worse - an outdoor flophouse, drug market, and handy rendezvous for the thugs, crims and kerbside conmen who plied their nefarious trades in Midtown's sucker-rich streets.

Only a fool or a tourist (in the Big Apple's lexicon, the two are often synonymous) would have lingered longer than it took for the lights to change and the traffic to stop.

But if a seasoned New Yorker had woken from a seven-year slumber and strolled those same streets last week, he would have been inclined to believe he was still dreaming.

Where the homeless legion's humpies of cardboard once sprouted and bums defecated in plain view of scurrying shoppers, there are now plantations of spring flowers, tables, chairs, even a jazz quartet to entertain the lunchtime crowds.

More amazing, nobody even looked like they might have been about to make off with the musicians' instruments.

"The city which once led the United States in homicides is now one of the safest in the country."

Judged by the norms of the fading past, it's as if present-day Herald Square had been transplanted from some parallel universe. And in sense, that is exactly what has happened. Call it Rudyland in honour of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the man who made it happen, along with so many other astonishing improvements to the megapolis that once seemed too tough to tame, too far gone to save.

The city which once led the United States in homicides is now one of the safest in the country. These days, statistics show it would be easier to get yourself killed in Kansas City than the Big Apple. Rapes, burglaries, muggings and subway slashers have all become relative rarities."

And then there's this from 1997 that we've reproduced here because its just such a good bit of writing. It too demonstrates the vast improvement in quality of life that have occurred in New York.

"When I came to New York eight years ago, it was a much tougher town than it is today. A recent report on the collapse of crime in New York sent me back to read my first impressions-recorded in a different journal-of the city's "Hogarthian rawness."

"There is much about Manhattan," I wrote in 1989, "that offends both the senses and elementary notions of decency. It is incessantly noisy, unspeakably filthy. Because there are too many people in too close contact with each other, the most common attitude New Yorkers adopt toward their fellow citizens involves an admixture of distracted indifference, incipient hostility, and impersonal rudeness.

Most people most of the time do not even look at each other. To make eye contact in a public place is to risk the sending of an inadvertent message: a proposition, if one is female; a challenge or threat, if one is male. Perpetually overwhelmed by the presence of uncountable others, one constructs an invisible refuge of psychic isolation.

As one of the characters in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities puts it, the essential need for the New Yorker is to 'insulate' himself from and against the existence of all those other people. . . .

"Callousness develops naturally in New York; it is in some ways simply a necessity. How else endure the routine horror?"

As I wrote those words in 1989, not the least of the "routine horror" involved the specter of violent crime. New York's crime rates have never been as bad as those of, say, Detroit or Washington, but the city's central place in the nation's imagination ensured that a situation that was quite bad enough in reality took on the aspect of a nightmare.

In 1989 the case of the "Central Park jogger," a young women raped, beaten, and left for dead by a gang of teenagers, became the symbol of crime out of control in a city reverting to the savagery of a Hobbesian state of nature.

I had come to the city, it turned out, as it reached the nadir of its reputation and self-confidence. National newsmagazines ran cover stories on "The Worm in the Big Apple," describing with barely hidden schadenfreude the city's presumed descent into chaos.

Even New York enthusiasts, those for whom Manhattan was the center of the universe and who had always assumed that civilization disappeared west of the Hudson, grieved over the city's decline and entertained heretical thoughts of escape to Connecticut or New Jersey.

It was my good fortune never to have personal experience of crime in New York-not even any close calls-but you were always aware of the possibility. If you did not walk the streets in fear and trembling, you did maintain a commonsense wariness, especially after dark. And there were constant reminders of crime's ubiquity, even in forms so petty as the signs, "No radio in car," then regularly posted in parked automobiles. (It was not unusual to see people making good on their claims by installing and removing their radios on a daily basis.)

When I moved to Roosevelt Island after a year on the Upper East Side, it was not because of fear of crime, but as I noted here two years ago, the Island's attractions included the fact that it was "two . . . things most of the rest of the city isn't: clean and safe." (I have, incidentally, since moved back to Manhattan, but that's another story.)

Well, now, it seems, everything has changed. Peace has come to Happy Valley. Over the past few years, New York's crime rate has dropped radically-so much so that it accounts for a full one-third of the total national decline. In 1989, there were more than 2,000 murders in the city. We finished last year with 983, the first time the total had dropped below 1,000 since 1968.

According to the most recent figures compiled by the FBI, New York's crime rate placed it 144th among the nation's 189 largest cities. You're safer here, the New York Times recently reported, than in Beaumont, Texas, Independence, Missouri, or Anchorage, Alaska.

Increased numbers of police and improved police practices have brought a decline not only in major crime categories but also in minor, "quality of life" violations. The once omnipresent "squeegee" people (you do want your windshield washed, don't you?) have disappeared, aggressive panhandling on the streets and in the subways has dropped off sharply, and reduced toleration for public drinking has (not surprisingly) reduced the incidence of public urination.

"a palpable difference in the conditions of life in the city"

All this has made a palpable difference in the conditions of life in the city. People feel good about New York in ways they haven't for a long time. Little things occur that would have been unthinkable when I first came to the city. As I was walking to work one morning during the Christmas season,

I had the extraordinary (for Manhattan) experience of having two separate people-total strangers-smile at me and wish me holiday greetings. The old "I love New York" theme-for years only a sour joke-has a new plausibility. Our very unlivability may be in question.

Real New Yorkers, who think that happiness-like civility-is for out-of- towners, know better than to trust good news. They worry about losing their edge. This isn't, after all, Minneapolis. Manhattan safer than Beaumont? The humiliation. New York without an edge of danger is as unnatural as New York without its Dostoyevskian citizenry.

You want nice, you could live in Scarsdale."

This piece from about 1999 gives some insight into the process and those behind it. As does this from Time Magazine in 1996.

And here is a psychological explanation of the principles behind it. It appears to be viral in nature :-) In fact its already spreading! To some place called Lawrence, see the story here If only it would spread to here.....