All the while, deep poverty, routine lethal violence, and epidemic levels of trauma persist in the Colony. There citizens find themselves pushed further toward the geographical margins, squeezed both by the punishing arithmetic of poverty and by the ceaseless surveillance of a police force tasked with corralling that poverty and keeping order in places the Nation has not yet annexed.
In 1997 I went to college, then moved to Chicago and D.C., and when I’d come back to visit New York, I found the old borders had been erased. White people were venturing everywhere! On my train rides from Manhattan back uptown to my parents’ house in the Bronx, I used to have a trick that would always ensure me a seat. I’d find a white person and stand right in front of them, certain they’d get off the train before Harlem and Washington Heights. But now my method no longer worked so well. I’d lurk over some white guy with a backpack, sneakers, and a paperback and would be shocked when he didn’t get off until 181st Street.
On the weekend nights when I visited the city, my friends who lived in the new New York would take me out to bars in Bushwick and Alphabet City, precincts that had once been part of the Colony but were now being absorbed into the Nation. For the relatively affluent, the hip, the privileged, the young and white and restless, the borders of the city had massively expanded. New York had essentially doubled in size! And in a place as crowded as this metropolis, the promise of more space was enticing. Those years of Rudy Giuliani and then Michael Bloomberg were marked by a kind of frontier euphoria among a certain (quite influential) set of New Yorkers. And for those less adventurous, it meant they could drop the cloak of white fear.
I cast it aside as well. I can’t remember when exactly, but I have distinct snapshot memories of moments in New York, walking around some neighborhood that might have been a foreign land in my youth and experiencing the sense of freedom that came with no longer attuning myself to every single last little bit of perceptual stimulus. A sense of being present fully and gloriously where I was, without looking over my shoulder.
I live in this city now, again, after being away for a long time. Our neighborhood is quiet, just a few blocks from the leafy parkside apartment where I last called the cops. There’s no graffiti on the trains, and no homeless on the streets where we live. There are cheese shops and yoga studios and farmers’ markets and playgrounds. For the small percentage of New Yorkers rich enough to enjoy it, life in the city has never been better. It’s still hard in its own bracing way, but it’s all so orderly now.
It’s also a heck of a lot safer and not just for people who live in the more rarified blocks of the Nation. Defenders of the “broken windows” approach, who include former NYPD commissioners Bratton and Ray Kelly, former mayor Giuliani, and the current liberal mayor Bill DeBlasio, argue that it was the central, key factor in the historic drop in crime, and as such its own kind of civil rights victory. Because people of color, particularly poor black city residents, were the most common victims of crime, and because they were the greatest beneficiaries of crime’s decline, the argument goes, all of the increased enforcement was actually on their behalf.
President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill put many more cops on the street under an explicit “broken windows” theory of order and deterrence. In the spring of 2016 he defended that law to a Black Lives Matter heckler this way: “Because of that [crime] bill we had a 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in the murder rate, and listen to this, because of that and the background-check law, we had a 46-year low in the deaths of people by gun violence,” he said. “And who do you think those lives were that mattered? Whose lives were saved that mattered?”
But it’s deeply unclear that this is true. Crime started falling before the crime bill was passed, and also before Rudy Giuliani was elected and Bill Bratton installed.
Why? We have no idea.
THE DROP IN CRIME in the United States from 1992 through today is one of the most stunning statistical and sociological mysteries of our time. A number of things are distinctive about it. First, crime dropped across all categories, from larceny to assaults to rape and murder. It dropped across all geographic areas, from the Deep South up to Maine. It dropped in rural areas, in midsize cities, and in big ones. It dropped in places with lots of racial diversity and in places with almost none. Perhaps most perplexing, it dropped in good economic times and in bad. You’d expect that in the wake of recession and economic crisis, at least certain categories of crime—property crimes, for example—would spike. But during both the relatively mild recession of 2001 and the historically awful Great Recession of 2007–9, even property crimes continued their decline.
As you might expect, this apparent victory over crime has a million self-proclaimed fathers. Literally dozens of theories claim to explain what “caused it,” but none of them definitive. Simple demographics played a large role: The baby boom meant that beginning in the late 1960s, a huge number of men entered into their peak crime-committing years. And indeed, crime spikes in developed nations (Canada among others) followed a similar trajectory (though not quite as pronounced as in the United States).
Mass incarceration also played some role in reducing crime. A society that put, say, every man aged 18 to 24 under carceral supervision could expect to see a reduction in violent crime, since that population commits a disproportionate amount of it. We also understand that that would be a tyrannical, indefensible slave state, but in large swaths of black and brown America, that’s not too far from what has happened.