Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop
by Peter Moskos
Oxford University Press, 312 pages, $29.95
Boomers, for all their unearned advantages in real estate and college tuition, never had a national victory to celebrate, or even the satisfaction of seeing their government accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. They were mostly too young to appreciate the eradication of polio, which they benefitted from. The triumphs of the civil rights revolution were soon tempered by riots, rising crime, and racial quotas. The spectacular moon landing was nearly eclipsed by Woodstock and transmuted culturally into Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey’s on the Moon.” Victory in the Cold War seemed almost anticlimactic, followed as it was by one forever war after another. The War on Poverty was largely lost; so was Vietnam. The substantial environmental advances of the ’70s soon gave way to fears of global warming.
There is one notable exception, albeit a local one. Far and away the most stunning governmental achievement I have witnessed was New York City’s successful war on crime in the 1990s, spearheaded by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and his successors. That too would turn into an ambivalent victory, followed in short order by what Heather Mac Donald’s best-seller would call “the War on Cops.” But the victory did happen, most New Yorkers recognized it at the time, and despite the surge in anti-cop politicking a generation later, New York City’s murder rate remains well below what it was in the early 1990s.
How it happened is in considerable part a policing story, and that is the focus of Peter Moskos’s Back from the Brink, presented as a view of New York City’s crime drop from “inside the NYPD.” Moskos is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a former Baltimore cop. His book consists almost entirely of slightly edited transcripts of interviews with top and medium rank New York cops from the 1980s and ’90s.
Readers searching for a sociologist’s considered reflection into how New York achieved what virtually no one thought possible will have to go elsewhere. But the interviews themselves are revealing on many levels, and anyone who experienced the crime drop as a fond memory or who simply enjoys reading New York cops’ reflections on their lives and work will appreciate Moskos’s book. Giuliani is hardly mentioned, and the Bratton and Giuliani team came apart over who more deserved acclamation for the crime drop, resulting in Bratton’s departure shortly after he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Bratton’s policing policies were innovative and needed, but it was Giuliani who hired him, knowing what he would get, after running a victorious mayoral campaign based largely on fighting crime and public disorder. Giuliani would have paid the price if Bratton’s policies had not delivered.
The two policing pillars behind the crime drop were the use of “Broken Windows” policing, whose name derived from a noted essay by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling arguing toleration of low level offenses—litter, public drunkenness, subway-fare evasion, and the like—contributed to more serious crime by signaling to the broader population that public order had broken down. Broken Windows policing, paying attention to such “victimless” offenses, did not in New York lead to many more arrests, but increased greatly the points of interaction between cops and low-level offenders, often generating information leading to arrests for more serious crimes.
The other pillar was the development of “CompStat”—the rigorous collection of crime data precinct by precinct. CompStat initially involved placing pin points indicating different sorts of crimes on a precinct map; shortly afterwards the NYPD got the data computerized. Daily analysis of CompStat data went hand in hand with a combined departmental centralizing–decentralizing that changed the culture of the NYPD. Under CompStat, precinct commanders were summoned to regular meetings at NYPD headquarters to present and analyze the statistics from their precincts and explain to top brass what they were going to do to bring crime rates down, and were given the resources to do so. This seemingly straightforward practice energized many precinct commanders while steering others into retirement, and it seemed to galvanize the whole force. In any case, the number of felonies in New York dropped 12 percent in Giuliani’s first year, 16 percent in both the second and third years, and kept going down. The city’s murder rate was an astonishing 89 percent lower in 2018 than it was in 1990.
Most New Yorkers believed crime was a given and couldn’t be dramatically reduced. Moskos quotes John Miller, who would become Bratton’s chief public affairs officer, telling the top police strategist Jack Maple that crime isn’t something you can arrest your way out of. “Societal ills are way bigger,” he said, expressing the nearly universally held conviction of the city’s establishment. Maple laughed. “Johnny, this will be an easy one so long as we have absolute control. This will be like shooting fish in a barrel.” Maple, a night-school graduate whom Bratton promoted over many more senior in his department, was proved right.
To experience this as a New Yorker was amazing. The impact was felt not only in the storied blocks of Manhattan, but throughout the city. By Giuliani’s first term, New Yorkers could experience a cleaned up and far safer Times Square and a Bryant Park where women felt safe to bring their children, a city largely freed of “wolf packs” of young teens who emerged from the trains for Manhattan robbery sprees. In the crime-ridden outer boroughs, street life and stoop culture began to return as fear receded. Squeegee men, who shook down female motorists at the city’s bridge and tunnel entrances, were sent packing. “How is this even possible?” I recall thinking about the squeegee men. Wasn’t the seemingly all-powerful New York Civil Liberties Union able, as it always was, to intervene effectively in favor of vagrants? But in the squeegee case, there turned out to be an ancient statute which could be used; it was a question of governmental will to actually use it.
The Prince of the City, the late Fred Siegel’s superb account of Giuliani’s mayoralty, first published 20 years ago, provides necessary cultural and political context to demonstrate both how this was possible in 1993, and why some of the gains were short-lived. The significance wasn’t obvious at the time, but the early ’90s were full of Democrats questioning the axioms of the New Deal and particularly those of Great Society liberalism. In this fresh ferment of center-right and center-left policy circles, the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal was founded, and prominent Democrats (including Bill Clinton and Al Gore) touted their affiliation with the moderate Democratic Leadership Council. David Osborne’s Reinventing Government (“not more government or less government, but better government” was its tagline) became an improbable best-seller.
Giuliani, defeated narrowly by David Dinkins in 1989, made himself part of this conversation, forging connections with new policy intellectuals and revealing himself as an extraordinary sponge for policy detail. City Journal touted Bill Bratton’s earlier success as New York’s transit police chief. On a local level, a surprising number of liberals or former liberals made clear they were done with the standard arguments of Great Society liberalism. On the progressive Upper West Side, a community meeting broke up in acrimony after hearing state mental health officials try to explain why they had no control over their clients repeatedly endangering people. New York’s Senator Daniel Moynihan published a famous essay, “Defining Deviancy Down,” in 1993; he thereafter observed in a speech to city business elites that New York in the days of corrupt Jimmy Walker was able to build the George Washington Bridge ahead of schedule, while the present city couldn’t complete any project. Dinkins, in the audience, retorted that in Moynihan’s “good old days” he had to sit in the back of the bus. But in 1993, such a comeback wasn’t a slam dunk. New Yorkers had had enough with putting “no radio” and “already robbed” notices in their cars, signs of what Moynihan called “urban surrender.” Facing both local and national pressure, Dinkins in his final year in office began hiring new cops, and the squeegee shutdown actually began in the waning days of his mayoralty.
This was the cultural wave that Giuliani, far from a gifted retail politician, rode into office, and why the city for so long welcomed Broken Windows policing.
The drop in crime and an energetic pro-middle class and pro-business administration was enough to ensure Giuliani a decisive reelection victory in 1997, but his opponents were only temporarily vanquished. The race-baiting Reverend Al Sharpton, effectively marginalized by Bratton and Giuliani early in the mayor’s first term, had emerged as the city’s principal black-vote power-broker by the late 1990s. Support for aggressive policing began to wobble as more perpetrators were imprisoned and the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk actions inconvenienced or insulted the innocent. Charges of police racism which might have prompted eyerolls in 1994 became a greater part of city conversation. Then in February 1999 an anti-robbery team seeking a murder suspect in Harlem asked a Guinean man who fit the description to stop and put his hands up. When Amadou Diallo, a street vendor who had filed a bogus asylum application, perhaps misunderstood what the cops told him and reached into his pocket, the cops fired 41 bullets into him. Diallo had no gun. The horrific incident and its aftermath changed the climate around law enforcement in New York. The New York Times, which had endorsed Giuliani’s reelection bid in 1997, opined that the city was under siege from its own police force.
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
In the Diallo case and its performative aftermath (many liberal celebrities, from the former Mayor Dinkins to Susan Sarandon, trooped down to One Police Plaza to be arrested for civil disobedience) showed the mainstream tolerance for aggressive policing had reached a kind of limit; aggressive policing in a community where a lot of criminals live produces inevitable resentments. The following decade laid the groundwork for a series of court cases that would roll back Broken Windows policing, most notably a 2013 ruling against stop-and-frisk, the police practice of stopping, questioning, and sometimes frisking suspicious individuals. This a judge ruled illegal because blacks and Hispanics were disproportionately stopped.
Major crime began to rise slowly, while the sense of public disorder (exemplified by the trial of Daniel Penny for subway vigilantism) soared. The current Democratic candidate for mayor, Zohran Mandami, did not make railing against cops a focus of his campaign, but he is comfortable using socialist buzzwords like “the carceral state” to describe the system of arresting criminals and sending them to jail. New York’s reversion to the crime levels of the 1980s seems, astonishingly, a distinct possibility.
Meanwhile, the former Mayor Giuliani, in a desperate bid to remain relevant, engaged himself in President Trump’s election denial efforts in 2020 and has spent much of his subsequent time in court, selling off assets, and pleading for funds on the internet. It’s not the end he deserves.
