In the late 1980s and early 1990s, things were about as bad as they could get in New York City. Roughly 2,000 residents were dying in homicides every year, far more than double the per capita rate of the United States as a whole. Public spaces, from the busy streets of downtown Manhattan to the dingy subway system, felt fundamentally out of control.
Recommended Stories
But then things improved at a rate no one could have thought possible. Homicides fell two-thirds in the Big Apple between 1993 and 1998, far faster than they fell elsewhere in the country. And while New York has never exactly been clean, the growing sense of public order was palpable to all who lived there, with some even complaining of a “Disneyfied” Times Square and the loss of New York City’s all-important seedy character.
Subsequent improvements have been more gradual, with some ground lost on occasion. But today, the striking reality is that America’s biggest city consistently has a homicide rate lower than that of the country as a whole.
What happened? In very large part, the New York City Police Department happened. Over this time frame, the NYPD implemented an entirely new strategy, combining a conviction that police could reduce crime if they tried, an appreciation of the fact that seemingly minor “broken windows” such as public drug use can fester a sense of disorder, a willingness to experiment with new ideas, and a simple but technology-fueled system of tracking where crimes happened and sending police to address the problem.
Back from the Brink, from the sociologist and former Baltimore police officer Peter Moskos, tells this story from the inside. The book is an oral history, in which Moskos briefly introduces each chapter and then lets his sources, ranging from former NYPD commissioners to everyday officers and community leaders, take it from there via lengthy interview excerpts.
This approach to storytelling has its trade-offs. But it nicely captures the experience of saving a city from ruin and allows each individual’s voice to truly come through — especially if one reads most of the book in a gruff New York cop accent.
There is, of course, a backstory to how New York found itself in such a dire situation by 1990, and that is where Back to the Brink begins. Walter Signorelli, who became an officer in 1967, tells Moskos that even then, crime was so high that he was taken out of the police academy after two months: They “put us walking around on foot post” alone in the South Bronx, wearing telltale police academy uniforms. “They left you out there without any control and supervision, very little training. You didn’t have a radio. If you needed help you were supposed to bang your nightstick on the curb.”
In 1975 came New York’s infamous bankruptcy and police layoffs that lasted two years. Charles Campisi, a patrolman at the time who later became a bureau chief, remembers fights between laid-off officers and sergeants who were annoyed about filling out the associated paperwork. He tells Moskos he still has his own layoff notice, and some officers hung theirs in their lockers: “It’s the late ’70s, major crimes are soaring, and the cops are disengaged.”
The next decade was little better for the city but showed signs of what was to come. Crime stayed high despite experiments such as the “Community Patrol Officer Program,” in which officers were sent out to connect with business owners and other members of the community and which Moskos’s sources remember with a mix of fondness and disdain. The ’80s also saw a major effort to rid the subway of graffiti. Jack Maple, later a deputy commissioner, made a name for himself using “decoys,” officers disguised as easy victims, to catch robbers, and with the Transit Police began pioneering the crime-mapping techniques that would later drive the bigger successes of the 1990s.
It’s delicious to conservatives that it took a Republican mayor to fix one of America’s bluest cities, and there is more than a little truth to the claim. But the years of David Dinkins’s mayoralty, running from 1990 through 1993, planted some of the seeds of Rudy Giuliani’s success. These included an initiative to hire more officers that began in 1990 but provided its biggest graduating class in 1994, and great strides made in ongoing efforts to improve places like Times Square, Port Authority, and Bryant Park. They also included Bill Bratton taking charge of the Transit Police, where he and Maple ramped up enforcement against fare evasion — checking for warrants along the way and finding many fare-beaters wanted for more serious offenses. Crime, especially robberies and pickpocketing, fell underground.
But it was, in fact, under Giuliani that Bratton returned from a brief stint in Boston to become commissioner, these strategies went citywide, and serious crime plummeted everywhere. Bratton and others, including the charmingly over-the-top Maple, who died in 2001 but appears here through interviews another writer recorded in the late ’90s, explain how they changed pretty much everything.
They swept aside much of the department’s top brass, swapped out the old “Maytag repairman” uniforms, changed hours so that more officers were deployed at the times when crime actually happened, and addressed quality-of-life issues such as drug dealing and illegal fireworks. Most famously of all, they collected comprehensive, up-to-date crime statistics across the city in a system they dubbed “Compstat,” used it to map patterns, and relentlessly interrogated precinct leaders at regular meetings about those patterns and how they would be addressed. These efforts paid dividends almost immediately, and crime fell.
Ultimately, the relationship between Giuliani and Bratton grew tense, with the latter departing for Los Angeles, where he replicated his success in bringing down crime. (Ego is a heckuva thing: Bratton being on the cover of Time seems to have played a role in their beef.) But these key early years proved that professional, motivated, data-driven urban policing can bring down crime and make public spaces livable, and Bratton’s successors would continue his strategies. Cities across the country, and the world, would adopt them as well.
Back from the Brink is rich not only in facts but also in character thanks to Moskos’s decision to let the officers tell their own stories. The book is a front-row seat to several decades of New York crime and policing history, featuring sources who were on the scene at the 1977 blackout, the 1984 Palm Sunday massacre, and the 1991 Crown Heights riot. There’s even an officer who later worked with members of Frank Serpico’s backup team and insists they would not have set him up. There are folks who remember the days when 911 first became available, when bulletproof vests were optional, or when officers communicated through oversized Motorola walkie-talkies.
BIDEN’S PARTING SHOT AGAINST LAW AND ORDER
The book is undeniably one-sided, in that its sources are overwhelmingly law enforcement. Yet even in this telling, police are not always heroes. Managing a large department entails not only motivating the unmotivated but also keeping a tight lid on corruption and abuse. As the years pass by in Moskos’s narrative, the scandals pile up too: The Knapp Commission’s investigation into rampant payoffs in the 1970s, officers in Queens torturing a suspect with a stun gun in the 1980s, the “Dirty Thirty” and similar outrages of the early 1990s involving extortion and drugs. Not to mention plenty of smaller anecdotes about, for instance, officers timing arrests at the ends of their shifts or otherwise scheming to get extra overtime.
The message here is that policing can and should be a force for immense good — under the right leadership and oversight. The New York of the mid-1990s showed departments around the world a way to get that right.
Robert VerBruggen is a Manhattan Institute fellow.