NYC & Crime - It's Complicated

The popular imagination holds that NYC has always been some sort of crime-ridden miasma that only recently cleaned up its act. 

Book, movies, TV shows, documentaries -- whatever -- have perpetuated the belief that criminals are lurking behind every corner of this city; that crime is just a part of the price that New Yorkers pay for living here; that we accept, even celebrate, the city as a place where outlaws thrive.

"Fear City" the media called it. Crime and NYC went hand-in-hand, apparently.

Actually, this isn't true. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

The truth is that for over a hundred years, from roughly the 1860s until the 1960s, crime in NYC was below average than other cities in the country (crime statistics don't go back much farther than then). NYC was actually a very safe city for more than century until the 1960s when the crime rate spiked dramatically, continuing until roughly the mid-1990s. Since then, of course, crime rates have plunged and NYC is, once again, one of the safest big cities in America. The late 20th century era of high crime in NYC was actually an aberration; an exception, not the rule.

So what happened? Why was crime so low for so long, why it go up so far so fast, and why did it fall again so dramatically? 

Lots of theories -- social, political, economic, etc. -- have been proffered and abound but the honest answer is no one knows.

Apparently, according to research, there are no clear, identifiable reasons for this bizarro bell-curve of crime. Whatever anyone tells you about why crime in NYC rose and fell like it did is either wrong or incomplete. No one wants to admit it but the reasons for the biggest societal changes in NYC in the last half-century -- one that led to decades of "white flight" followed by decades of gentrification -- are unknown, unknowable, and impossible to conclude definitavely. The only thing we know is that we don't know.

So whenever you hear fear mongers try to convince you that NYC is just one election, one policy change, one-thing-or-another away from the return to high crime, tell them they have no idea what they're talking about. That's one thing we know for sure.