How New York City Got Safe

As he is sworn in today, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani takes office having already drawn a sharp line with the city’s recent past, pledging, among other things, to end police sweeps of homeless encampments. This marks a clean break from the ethos of order maintenance policing that once defined New York’s anti-crime strategies in the 1990s and early 2000s. When the outgoing mayor announced encampment sweeps in the spring of 2022, he gave voice to the same righteous indignation that animated that earlier era of law enforcement: “No more smoking, no more doing drugs. No more sleeping, no more doing barbecues on the subway system. No more just doing whatever you want.” Mandami’s reversal thus signals a deeper break with that past: less coercion, more compassion; less policing, more social policy. But as a recent book makes uncomfortably clear, this shift might not merely be bad policy. It might well be a grave mistake.

Peter Moskos’s Back from the Brink is both oral history and urban epic—a ground-level account of New York’s astonishing, world-historical crime decline, narrated by the cops, commissioners, city officials, and civic leaders who tried, failed, improvised, and, in Moskos’s telling, ultimately helped turn the city from a national cautionary tale into a global public safety success story. A Harvard-educated sociologist, former police officer, and current professor at John Jay College, Moskos stitches together a dense tapestry of personal recollections and hard-earned reflections to advance a simple, stubbornly controversial claim: Policing matters. No one puts the point more plainly than Louis Anemone, one of the NYPD’s highest-ranking officials in the early 1990s: “Police can affect behavior. We really can.” 

For decades, academics and pundits have feuded over the so-called great crime decline. To be clear, the decline was real. Moskos opens with an astounding fact: Between 1990 and 1999, murders in New York City dropped by 70 percent, from 2,262 to 671. By 2018, the number had fallen below 300—a result he calls “a phenomenal achievement for an American city” of more than 8 million people. In less than a generation, New York transformed from the cinematic dystopia of 1979’s The Warriors into one of the safest major cities in the world. 

Between 1990 and 1999, murders in New York City dropped by 70 percent, from 2,262 to 671. By 2018, the number had fallen below 300—a result Moskos calls “a phenomenal achievement for an American city” of more than 8 million people.

But crime also fell elsewhere: in Washington and Los Angeles, in Boston and Dallas, not just in New York. The decline was so dramatic that it birthed a cottage industry of explanation. Depending on whom you read, the great crime drop was about economics and demography—a strong economy, an aging population, the waning of the crack markets. Or it was about mass incarceration and harsher sentencing. Or abortion access. Or lead concentration. Or new technologies and security practices, from better car locks to ubiquitous surveillance cameras. And then, of course, there is policing: the rise of “community policing,” hot-spots enforcement, performance management systems, and the whole family of “order maintenance” strategies associated—fairly or not—with “broken windows.” 

Many academics, policy makers, and journalists have soured on the broken windows theory, including other variants of order maintenance policing. Even Malcolm Gladwell—perhaps the theory’s best-known popularizer from his book The Tipping Point—has recanted. “Here’s the thing I’ve come to understand about the explanation I gave for why crime fell in New York,” he said during a TED talk, 24 years after the book’s release. “I was wrong.” In many parts of the academy, to suggest that policing, especially broken windows–type strategies, played a major role in the crime drop is to endorse reactionary politics and sanction failed, racist approaches. The tendency has been to explain the great crime decline with anything but the work of cops on the street. To be clear, Moskos does not settle that argument. His book is not a statistical model or a grand unified theory of criminal justice. It is, instead, an unusually textured and contextualized effort to answer a narrower set of questions from the inside out: What did the crime decline look and feel like to the people who struggled through the city’s near collapse and then helped drag it back from the brink? 

To appreciate Moskos’s intervention, one must return to the broken windows theory. In their now-classic essay, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling posed a question that sounded paradoxical at the time: How can a neighborhood feel “safer” even when the crime rate has not gone down—or has even gone up? Their answer was that safety cannot be reduced to the FBI’s index offenses. It is bound up instead with “what most often frightens people in public places.” As Wilson and Kelling observed, while people are certainly terrified by violence, they are often just as haunted by everyday encounters with “disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.”

Back from the Brink underscores just how deeply this theory shaped policing policy in the 1990s. Bill Bratton—who, as transit police chief, launched a “broken windows” strategy on the subway in 1990—told Moskos that he embraced the approach because whenever he went into communities, he “heard people complaining about broken windows.” “Even in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods—they used to complain about crime, certainly—but what I came to understand was that everyday people were seeing this crazy city and what a mess that was,” Bratton said.

It is tempting to dismiss statements like this as self-serving, post hoc justification. But the survey evidence tells a strikingly similar story. A 1979 survey of residents in Harlem and the South Bronx underscores just how central quality-of-life concerns—both physical decay and behavioral disorder—were to the city’s most marginalized communities. The single most frequently cited problem was bad or slum housing (29 percent), followed closely by drugs (25 percent) and crime and criminals (22 percent). In Harlem, these anxieties were sharper still: 32 percent identified bad housing as the top concern, 29 percent pointed to drugs, and 23 percent referred to crime. Beneath these headline categories sat a dense layer of everyday disorder. Robberies and muggings were cited by 12 percent of respondents citywide (15 percent in the Bronx), abandoned or burned-out housing by 11 percent overall (15 percent in the Bronx), and juvenile delinquency by 7 percent. Smaller but still telling shares pointed to littered streets (6 percent), vandalism (4 percent), lack of sanitation (4 percent), public drunkenness (2 percent), and fires (3 percent overall, rising to 6 percent in the Bronx)—the very conditions that made public space feel unstable and threatening.

In many parts of the academy, to suggest that policing, especially broken windows–type strategies, played a major role in the crime drop is to endorse reactionary politics and sanction failed, racist approaches.

Nearly a decade later, these concerns had not abated. Even as homicide rates continued to climb, a 1988 survey of New York State residents commissioned by the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services revealed the persistence—and salience—of quality-of-life anxieties. Nearly three-fifths of residents reported that their neighborhoods suffered from at least one “quality of life” problem: rowdy youth, homeless people, or crumbling buildings. Almost half complained about disorderly teenagers; nearly a third cited problems with homeless people; another third pointed to physical decay. As these problems accumulated, fear spiked. Only about one in 10 residents of trouble-free neighborhoods reported feeling unsafe out alone at night; among those living amid two or three major problems, that figure rose to nearly 60 percent.

Taken together, these numbers tell a story that crime rates alone cannot. Residents did not draw neat distinctions between “serious crime” and “minor disorder”; they experienced both as part of a single moral and environmental unraveling. The persistence of concerns about dirty streets, abandoned buildings, vandalism, and insufficient police protection—often registering in double-digit shares in the hardest-hit neighborhoods—helps explain why order maintenance policing resonated so deeply with the public. Fear was not produced by violence alone, but by the steady accumulation of visible signals that no one was in charge and by unwanted encounters with “disreputable,” “obstreperous,” or “unpredictable” individuals, including “rowdy teenagers,” drug users, and the homeless. In this view, “safety”—or at least the perception of it—was secured as much through the removal of these perceived threats as through declining crime rates. That, at least, is a key claim Moskos’s book presses with unusual force.

One of Moskos’s interviewees, Steve Hill, a transit cop, gets to the heart of the matter with disarming clarity. Order maintenance, he explains, was “more about acknowledging the things that made people feel unsafe,” even if “the violent predators are still going to be out there shooting and killing people.” It sounds like a concession, but it is the opposite. Hill is insisting that reducing fear, reclaiming public space, and pushing back disorder matter in their own right—not because they shave a few points off homicide rates, but because they reshape how ordinary New Yorkers experience the city.

Hill’s stories make that point concrete. He recalls a morning train disrupted by a homeless man “pissing,” shouting, and driving passengers “crazy,” until an officer seized the moment—“‘This is your stop, buddy.’ Boom!”—and threw him onto the platform. “No paperwork,” Hill notes, and as the doors closed “the entire train applauded.” The applause is key. It captures a public worn down by daily disorder and viscerally grateful when someone finally intervened. Elsewhere, Hill recalls how riders at Utica Avenue during rush hour were “happy to see” an officer in uniform. For every person who cursed or spit, he observed, “ten others will appreciate you being here.” What people valued was not abstract crime control, but the simple assurance that they could sit on a train without worrying about “somebody crazy walking up on them, spitting or littering or urinating or defecating.”

Reducing fear, reclaiming public space, and pushing back disorder matter in their own right—not because they shave a few points off homicide rates, but because they reshape how ordinary New Yorkers experience the city.

Again, the book is not content to rest with the modest claim that police intervention and the removal of disorder merely makes people feel safer. Its ambitions are higher. Moskos presses a stronger argument that the diligent work of the beat cop, the creativity and vision of police leaders like Bratton, and the political buy-in of elected officials such as Mayor Rudy Giuliani made the city safer in real terms—not just perceived ones. Given the scale of the policing revolution described by his interviewees and observed by their contemporaries, this is hardly unreasonable.

What the interviews reveal is not simply a retrospective defense of the broken windows theory but a set of institutional and managerial reforms that reshaped how policing actually functioned on the ground. When Bratton returned to New York City as police commissioner in 1994, “broken windows” meant the systematic enforcement of quality-of-life offenses, paired with a genuine managerial overhaul. Bratton’s team worked aggressively to make officers more efficient and effective, but the real engine of change was CompStat—a data-driven police management system that uses frequent crime statistics reviews to hold commanders accountable and rapidly deploy resources to where they are most needed. As one commander recalls, “This philosophy of CompStat is what really changed the direction of the ship.” Many outsiders, she notes, mistook CompStat for “a session or an event,” when in fact “it’s a philosophy”—nothing less than “a sea change.” The shift was about “holding commanders accountable and letting them take ownership of their command”: demanding leadership, encouraging officers to be “innovative and creative,” to “use good judgment,” and to act with “a moral compass” and “the highest level of integrity.” By introducing real-time crime tracking and mandatory, high-pressure accountability sessions, Bratton forced precinct commanders to know their numbers, explain their strategies, and adjust tactics quickly. Policing moved from reactive to preventive, from anecdote to constant measurement, and from diffuse responsibility to personal accountability.

Although a former cop, Moskos is no cheerleader for the NYPD, nor is he immune to two decades of scholarship critical of the origins and character of modern policing, or to the department’s own checkered history. After Bratton’s departure, evidence emerged that cops and precinct captains in the NYPD were “juking the stats” under the system’s relentless pressure to show results—and that turned out to be true of other cities that adopted it, as anyone who has watched The Wire knows. The book is clear-eyed about corruption and racism in the department—though it is worth noting that some of the most objectionable tactics, including stop-and-frisk, also emerged years after Bratton’s departure. What Moskos ultimately offers, then, is not a whitewash of the institution, but a far sharper sense of the people involved—their backgrounds, personal quirks, professional goals, and moral commitments—as they struggled, imperfectly, to make New York City a safer place.

It is the convergence of an emergent theory of crime (and fear) and novel managerial techniques and technologies—alongside a shared, ardent devotion to tackling the “mess” the city had become—that anchors the book’s central causal claim about the crime drop. Beyond such firsthand testimony, however, Back from the Brink does not attempt a systematic causal test linking these strategies—or the particular individuals who implemented them—to the precipitous decline in violent crime and the resurgence of public safety. What it offers instead is something different, and no less consequential: a richly documented account of how those closest to the work understood what they were doing, why they believed it mattered, and how order, safety, and legitimacy came to be rebuilt together on the ground by policing—and why that rebuilding mattered to New Yorkers, especially those living in the city’s most disadvantaged areas.

As Mayor Mamdani’s recent announcement ending sweeps of homeless encampments suggests, New York City may now be witnessing the final retreat from the order maintenance policing that once dominated the city. Many will applaud this development. But before turning his back entirely on that past, the new mayor would do well to consult Back from the Brink. Moskos’s achievement is not that he has solved the riddle of the 1990s. It is that he has listened—carefully and patiently—to the people who were on the job as New York fumbled its way back to something like order, and that he has treated their perceptions, like those of the citizens they served, as social realities worth considering rather than dismissing.

Ultimately, Moskos’s book is less a brief for any particular policy package than a reminder that crime statistics and police strategies are only part of the story. The rest lives in memory: of parks once abandoned and now busy; of stairwells once haunted and now quiet; of officers once derided who, for all their flaws, made people feel that someone finally cared whether their block was a place to hurry through or a place to live. That is not the whole of justice. Certainly, those deemed “disreputable,” “obstreperous,” or “unpredictable” deserve their own measure of peace and dignity. But it is a piece of justice—and of politics—that we ignore at our peril.

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