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NYPD Was Tives to Misdemeanor Arrest

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NYPD Was Tives to Misdemeanor Arrest BROKEN WINDOWS AND QUALITY-OF-LIFE POLICING IN NEW YORK CITY WILLIAM J. BRATTON Police Commissioner THE NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT | 2015 VIBRANT AND DENSE, New York City is inhabited were a symbol of New York for a different reason. by people from every continent and every coun- The underground graffiti, crime, and disorder try, speaking every language in every accent, rep- were emblematic of an aboveground city that had resenting every culture and every creed. It “orbits become so parlous that it was driving America’s around eight million centers of the universe,” as crime rate. That year was crime’s apogee and New York’s poet laureate Billy Collins once wrote. the city’s nadir. In 1990, the city accounted for Today that figure is closer to 8.4 million, and 2.9 percent of the nation’s population and 9.6 doesn’t include the additional millions who come percent of the nation’s homicides and this at a each day, to work, or visit, or otherwise enjoy time when the whole nation was more violent. America’s greatest city. Mayor Bill de Blasio and I By 2013, those figures were 2.7 percent and 2.4 have pledged to make a safer, fairer city for resi- percent, respectively. The city, once the site of a dents and visitors alike, and this report describes tenth of the country’s murders, now literally has one of the main tools for doing so: quality-of-life less than its share. policing. More than any other factor, what caused this ~ amazing change was Broken Windows, or qual- ity-of-life policing. The term Broken Windows PERHAPS EVEN MORE than Lady Liberty in the comes from an eponymous 1982 article in the harbor, the subway pole is the symbol of this city. Atlantic, written by George Kelling and the late Every day, the city’s diverse millions—black and James Q. Wilson. In brief, Kelling and Wilson white, rich and poor, from Brooklyn or Bhutan, asserted that unaddressed disorder encourages from Queens or Qatar—cram into the tight con- more disorder. From that follows crime, then fines of the country’s busiest transit system. Five increasingly serious crime, and finally violence. and a half million people ride the subways every This criminogenic progression existed irrespective day, coursing through the metaphorical heart of of a neighborhood’s demographics. As Kelling and New York. What the subway pole denotes is that Wilson wrote, “Window-breaking does not neces- this city works. In very crowded circumstances, sarily occur on a large scale because some areas five and a half million people—six million on peak are inhabited by determined window breakers days—go to work together and school together, whereas others are populated by window-lovers; sometimes squeezed shoulder to shoulder, and rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal they do it in peace. Amazingly, there are fewer that no one cares, and so breaking more windows than six crimes a day on average. Because Ameri- costs nothing.” ca’s greatest city is her safest big city, as well. Beginning in 1990, I applied these ideas to crime It wasn’t always so. in the New York City transit system. We wouldn’t ignore the little things. Fare evasion and graffi- When I first came to this city in 1990, as Chief ti would no longer be considered too petty to of the New York City Transit Police, the subways address. In fact, we’d focus on them as vigorously 1 BROKEN WINDOWS AND QUALITY-OF-LIFE POLICING IN NEW YORK CITY NYC Crime Rate and Misdemeanor Arrests % Above/Below 5-City Avg NYC Misdemeanor Arrest Rate per 100,000 40% 4,000 30% 3,500 20% 3,000 10% 0% 2,500 -10% 2,000 -20% -30% 1,500 -40% 1,000 -50% 500 -60% -70% 0 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 NYC Crime Rate Relative to 5-City Avg NYC Misdemeanor Arrest Rate In order to put New York City's crime decline in context, this chart displays New York City's crime rate—the blue line—as a percentage above or below the average of the state's five next largest cities (Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Yonkers)—the black zero line. Atop that sits New York City’s misdemeanor arrest rate per 100,000 residents, in red. Figure A as on serious crimes like robberies, if not more so. should have been enjoyed by other, fare-paying rigorous, it fell only 17.9 percent. Why? Because serious crime was more likely to riders. A subway criminal arrested for a misde- occur in a lawless environment—and ubiquitous meanor rather than a felony wouldn’t be going to It’s hard to overstate how counterintuitive this low-level disorder signaled lawlessness even more prison, but he wouldn’t be victimizing anyone for was in 1990. Observers, academics, and pundits than serious crime, which was less common. We a while, either. had difficulty with the idea of concentrating also quickly learned that the serious criminals on fare beating when felony violent crime was committed petty crimes, too. When they weren’t Quality-of-life policing in the transit system as predominant as it was. But we proved the committing robberies or assaults, they were hop- worked. From 1990 through 1993, crime rates conventional wisdom wrong, first in the transit ping turnstiles, unlawfully moving between cars, underground fell by 35.9 percent. In the city system and then, starting in 1994, in New York and generally diminishing the quality of life that above, where quality-of-life enforcement was less City as a whole the first time I served as Police 2 THE NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT | 2015 Commissioner. With my leadership team—partic- quality-of-life policing to the city as a whole, that may result. That’s why index-crime arrests are ularly Deputy Commissioner of Operations, the we saw New York City’s crime rate fall below the down 36% from 1994 (in 2014, there were 60,000 late Jack Maple, and Chief of Department, Louis average of the state’s next five largest cities. And fewer felony arrests than there were twenty years Anemone—we established the crime accountabil- compared to the crime rate of those other cities, ago). That’s why the city jail population on Rikers ity system known as CompStat. which were not using CompStat and Broken Island was nearly halved between 1993 and 2013. Windows, our crime rate just kept dropping, until That’s why, from 1990 to 2012, New York City has Using crime mapping and organizational account- New York City had nearly 60% less crime than its sent 69% fewer people to state prisons (and it is ability practices, CompStat recreated, at the in-state peers. the major factor in the state prison population executive command level, the Broken Windows declining 25% from 2000 to 2013). Misdemeanor philosophy of sweating the small stuff before it The frequent argument that New York City’s crime arrestees don’t go to prison, and they rarely go to became the big stuff. The advent of quality-of-life decline was or is no greater than the regional or jail. (See page 24.) policing for the cops and management account- national decline is patently untrue. ability for the commanders amounted to a public safety revolution that was about more than More misdemeanor arrests ultimately led to NONE OF THIS means we can’t explore alterna- fighting crime—it was about preventing crime. A few-er felony arrests because the NYPD was tives to misdemeanor arrest. We can and we are primary means of doing so was stopping low-level preventing crime more effectively. By applying doing so. We can be more considered and more disorder and petty crime before they flourished summonses to violations and arrests to misde- considerate. We can be more respectful and more and invited more serious crime. meanor crimes, rather than looking the other respected—and we will be. way because these offenses are “too insignifi- The chart on the previous page (Figure A) shows cant,” officers were correcting conditions early. The fact is that quality-of-life polic-ing is not about New York City’s crime rate, in blue, as a percent- Arresting someone for a misdemeanor frequently the blind pursuit of arrests; it’s about what it says age relative to the crime-rate average of New prevents him from graduating to committing it’s about: the quality of life in this city. Critics York State’s next five largest cities, which is the felonies, for which severe sanctions like prison of Broken Windows regularly conflate it with horizontal zero line. Atop that sits New York City’s “zero-tolerance tactics,” but I have never equated misdemeanor arrest rate per 100,000 residents, the two, nor does George Kelling, and neither did in red. Jack Maple or James Q. Wilson. In their Atlantic article, while discussing order maintenance on After a mid-’80s peak and fall, the misdemeanor public transportation, Kelling and Wilson noted arrest rate gradually began to rise again in 1990. Misdemeanor arrestees that “the enforcement need involve nothing more This was influenced by my adoption of quali- than ejecting the offender (the offense, after all, ty-of-life policing in the transit system, as our don’t go to prison, is not one with which a booking officer or a judge small force started taking back the platforms and and they rarely go to jail.
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