Michael Savage of The Independent's Open House blog scoffs at Tim Montgomerie and Daniel Finkelstein for upholding zero tolerance policing as a success story worth replicating in the UK. Savage rightly notes that New York's dramatic decline in crime should be seen in the context of a national trend that began before Rudy Giuliani came to power and whose positive effects were seen in cities such as Boston and Chicago. Below is a graph showing crime plummeting across many American cities as the nation's prison population rocketed.
But the graph, produced using the FBI data source he links to, also shows that cities he mentions emphatically did not do as well as New York did in the same period. Below in table form are the changes in rates of violent and property crimes per 100,000 population since 1994, when Rudy Giuliani became Mayor (bizarrely, the chart Savage cites does not take any account of non-violent crime).
So over the period that Giuliani was Mayor of New York, crime rates in Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles fell impressively - by about a third in each case. But in New York they fell by more than half.
By 2006, Boston and Chicago had crime rates about 40% lower, and Los Angeles 55% lower. But in New York, crime had dropped by almost two-thirds.
Clearly mass incarceration across the US made the biggest difference, but the data suggest that New York under Giuliani did more than simply ride a tide of the national trend. It is hardly unreasonable or the stuff of 'myths' to attribute New York's particularly remarkable success in cutting crime to its zero tolerance policing. The evidence from New York is that increasing the prison population and zero tolerance policing - catching criminals and sentencing them - were both essential components of achieving such major reductions in crime. This is exactly the lesson Finkelstein and Montgomerie suggested we learn.
(Anyone who would like a copy of the spreadsheet I put together to produce the above graph and table, feel free to email me.)
