Why Has New York's Murder Rate Dropped?

Heather MacDonald is the author of The War Against Cops and writes often on crime and urban policy. She has a very interesting take on the recent statistics showing a drop in the murder rate in New York City to levels not seen since the 1950s, one response to which is that proactive policing - stop and frisk and other such measures - are unnecessary. MacDonald disagrees.

Here's an excerpt from her recent essay in National Review:

The New York Police Department’s reported-stop activity plummeted earlier in this decade as a result of a groundless trilogy of racial-profiling lawsuits against the department. Yet crime in New York ultimately continued its downward trajectory. Therefore, proactive policing like pedestrian stops is unnecessary, [some] cop critics say.

Their arguments are specious. New York City’s formerly high-crime neighborhoods have experienced a stunning degree of gentrification over the last 15 years, thanks to the proactive-policing-induced conquest of crime.

It is that gentrification which is now helping fuel the ongoing crime drop. Urban hipsters are flocking to areas that once were the purview of drug dealers and pimps, trailing in their wake legitimate commerce and street life, which further attracts law-abiding activity and residents in a virtuous cycle of increasing public safety.

The degree of demographic change is startling. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, the number of white residents rose 1,235 percent from 2000 to 2015, while the black population decreased by 17 percent, reports City Lab. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, the number of whites rose 610 percent over that same decade and a half; the black population was down 22 percent.

Central Harlem’s white population rose 846 percent; the black share dropped 10 percent. In 2000, whites were about three-quarters of the black population in Brownsville-Ocean Hill; by 2015, there were twice as many whites as blacks. In 2000, whites were one-third of the black population in Crown Heights North and Prospect Heights; now they exceed the black population by 20,000.

The Brooklyn Navy Yards has now been declared the next cool place to be by the tech industry. Business owners are moving their residences as well as their enterprises to the area.

This demographic transformation has enormous implications for crime. A black New Yorker is 50 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker, according to perpetrator identifications provided to the police by witnesses to, and victims of, those shootings. Those victims are overwhelmingly minority themselves.

When the racial balance of a neighborhood changes radically, given those crime disparities, its violent-crime rate will as well. (This racial crime disparity reflects the breakdown of the black family and the high percentage of black males — upwards of 80 percent in some neighborhoods — being raised by single mothers.)

The high-crime areas of Baltimore and Chicago have not been gentrified. Baltimore is experiencing its highest per capita murder rate for the third year in a row. While Chicago’s homicide numbers are down somewhat this year, thanks to the aggressive use of shot-spotter technology, they remain at a level far higher than in the past decade. The year 2017 will mark only the second time since 2003 that homicides surpassed 600, according to the Chicago Tribune.

In other words, when upscale yuppies and similar folk take over a neighborhood, violent crime goes down. In cities where gentrification hasn't happened on the same scale as in New York violent crime remains high.

MacDonald has much more to say about this in her essay which you can access at the link.