Bratton became the face of this crime decline, featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1996 with the triumphant headline “Finally We’re Winning the War Against Crime. Here’s Why.” In large part because New York was the star city of the crime drop, the “broken windows” approach was adopted in city after city. Bratton subsequently left New York to head up the LAPD, where he also put his methods to work. He published a best-selling memoir with the immodest title Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic.
While the actual role that “broken windows” policing played in the dramatic drop in crime is still hard to disentangle (about which more in a moment), one thing is certain: its implementation fundamentally and permanently altered the city in two distinct, indelible ways. First, it completely changed the mise-en-scène of city life, erasing the seediness that colored my youth. As the Giuliani era hit full bloom, you would hear cheery pronouncements from out-of-town visitors about how transformed Manhattan was: So clean! So accessible! So much more inviting!
Second, “broken windows” as a philosophy of urban governance altered the administration of justice in New York City. Issa Kohler-Hausmann, who’s done some of the most thorough empirical work on New York City’s “quality of life” arrests, notes that while arrests for low-level offenses skyrocketed, the actual rate of criminal convictions dropped. She argues that “broken windows” actually created a parallel court system, with an altogether different set of goals.
Misdemeanor justice in New York City has largely abandoned what I call the adjudicative model of criminal law administration—concerned with adjudicating guilt and punishment in specific cases—and instead operates under what I call the managerial model—concerned with managing people over time through engagement with the criminal justice system over time.
In other words, New York constructed an entire new judicial system around low-level offenses. The goal of this system is not to figure out if the person in question committed a crime but to sort city residents according to their obedience and orderliness. So expansive is this system of misdemeanor sorting that in a city that’s 80 percent less violent than it was two decades ago, the NYPD makes thousands of arrests a year of people who are doing things like selling M&Ms on the subway. Similar explosions of small-infraction misdemeanor citations, and summons happened across the country, from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles to Ferguson.
This system of order maintenance, in which unruly citizens are marked and sorted, in which seediness is kept at bay, so that the Nation can stay pristine and inviting, confers tremendous benefits, wealth, and comfort on some and widespread harassment and misery on others.
New York went from rundown and dangerous to glossy and glamorous, and the transformation unleashed a geyser of cash. Between 1991 and 2015 the number of visitors to the city more than doubled, from 29 million to 58 million. The amount those visitors spent annually quadrupled from $10 billion to $40 billion.
Colleges and universities across the city saw an application boom, just one small indication of how the city’s ebbing “seediness” conferred tangible, material economic benefits on its institutions and businesses. But more than anything, the drop in crime and the palpable decline in disorder produced one of the greatest increases in real estate value in American history.
I SAW IT HAPPEN firsthand.
Every day from seventh grade until I graduated high school, I rode an express bus from the Bronx down to my school on the Upper East Side. The route passed through Harlem, one of New York’s most legendary neighborhoods. Once upon a time Harlem was affluent, an uptown proto-suburb, away from the crowds, noise, and stench of nineteenth-century downtown Manhattan. Its opulence in certain quarters persisted into the twentieth century as it became the intellectual and artistic capital of black life in America.
By 1991, when I started passing through Harlem, decades of government policy had crowded it with housing projects, while starving it of capital through redlining. But the beauty of Harlem was always there even amid the physical disintegration that comes with poverty.
At 125th Street, Fifth Avenue dead-ends at Marcus Garvey Park, a lovely eight-square-block patch of green with a swimming pool and recreation center, ringed on all sides by stately brownstones built just after 1900. In my youth, the buildings were derelict and almost all abandoned, and the park was, well, seedy. A halfway house stood on an adjacent block. But I was taken with what a staggeringly lovely spot it was. I used to dream of that park and those stately buildings peering out over it.
Fast-forward to 2016, and one of the brownstones on the western border of the park is listed for $5 million. “Mount Morris Park West is one of the most sought after blocks if not the most sought after block in prime Harlem!!!,” exclaims the listing, describing it as
situated on a quiet residential area, but it is also surrounded by various shopping, great restaurants, and transportation. Soon to be finished Whole Foods around the corner on 125th and Lenox; furthermore local restaurants include celeb chef Marcus Samuelson’s Red Rooster, as well as Corner Social, Cheri, Maison Harlem, Chez Lucienne, and many more.
Just around the block from that house, on the south side of Marcus Garvey Park, stands a luxury high-rise, Fifth on the Park, built in 2007. A three-bedroom apartment goes for about $2.4 million. You can’t help but notice that the official real estate listing calls Marcus Garvey Park by its original, decidedly less black-separatist name, Mount Morris Park.