Maybe we should start with a John Jay College of Criminal Justice publication from just after Rudy Giuliani left office. New York crime down; the rest of the country ... up.
(2002) Law Enforcement News Vol. XXVIII, Nos. 589, 590 A publication of John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/len/2002/12.31/page5.html Don’t tell New York, but crime is going upNew York City may be a prominent if surprising exception, but much of the rest of the country is experiencing what analysts and criminal justice experts see as the beginning of the end of the nation’s longest-running downturn in crime. And the statistics were there to prove it.
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2001, released this past July, showed overall crime up by 2 percent that year over 2000, and the volume of violent offenses up by 0.6 percent. The number of murders grew by 3 percent, and robberies by 3.9 percent. Western states reported a 1.7-percent increase in crime — the highest of four regions. The South had a 1.0-percent increase in crime, but was the only region to record a decrease in murders — 2.1 percent.
“Murder is the most reliable indicator of serious crime we have,” Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University, told The Boston Herald. “This is the beginning of the turnaround.”
Crime also increased slightly, by 1.3 percent, during the first six months of 2002, according to a preliminary report. Statistics released in December month showed a 2.3-percent increase in murder and an increase of nearly 2 percent in rape during the first half of 2002. Burglaries rose by 4.2 percent over the same period in 2001, and motor vehicle thefts by 4.2 percent.
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Three years later, as Bloomberg built on Giuliani's stunning success.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_ny_crime.html
(2005)
New York Crime Hits a Tipping Point
E. J. McMahon
Reinforcing New York City’s improved policing strategies in the 1990s
were tougher sentencing laws and a significant expansion of the city and
state correctional systems. Would-be criminals in the Big Apple came to
realize that they were not only more likely to get caught, but more
likely to end up serving hard time.
The results have been nothing less than spectacular: by one key measure, serious crime in the city has dropped 70 percent over the past 15 years.
But that success is also yielding another, less widely noticed, dividend: with felony arrests dropping as a result of the falling crime rate, New York’s once-swollen city jails and state prisons are becoming less crowded. This has begun to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings for state and city taxpayers.
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