Good Cop

Why America’s streets are safer today than a generation ago.

In 1988, Willie Horton–a furloughed Massachusetts criminal who had skipped to Maryland where he robbed, raped, and pistol-whipped his victims–starred in a campaign ad used to tag Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis as soft on crime. The ad was a high (or low) point of the campaign, but almost 20 years later, it seems almost quaint. Looking back from 2007, after a midterm election in which crime was a non-issue, it is easy to forget how salient a theme it once was in national politics. And yet the Horton ad was successful because it appeared at the crest of the rising fear of crime in American cities, which spanned the late 1970s through the early ’90s. State and federal politicians prescribed long criminal sentences, most notably in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and in California’s “three strikes” law, upheld in 2003 by a sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court.

In the years following the Horton ad, conservative thinkers warned that the nation would–because of a rising teenage population–soon experience an unprecedented crime wave. In 1996, William Bennett, John DiIulio, and John Walters declared that “America’s beleaguered cities are about to be victimized by a paradigm-shattering wave of ultra-violent, morally vacuous young people some call ‘the super predators.’ ” But their heated rhetoric was published just as American crime was beginning to decline. Every year between 1992 and 2004, the FBI reported a national crime drop of several percentage points. Although declines occurred nationwide, the most noteworthy was in New York City, whose “mean streets” and “needle parks” had long been etched into the national consciousness through film and TV screens.

The question remains, however: Why did crime decline so significantly? There are no uncomplicated answers, as Franklin Zimring, a law professor and criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley (who, in the interests of disclosure, has been a friend and colleague over many years) convincingly demonstrates. Zimring, the author of 18 notable books on various aspects of crime and crime policy, has once again produced an important, carefully reasoned, and readable book. Contrary to the beliefs of many armchair theorists, there is no simple and consistent explanation for the crime decline, Zimring argues. He is skeptical about the effects of the big three “usual suspects”: imprisonment, the economy, and demography. Each, he acknowledges, has some effect, but none has proven consistently meaningful. There are no unwavering correlates of crime, and thus it is difficult, if not impossible, to develop a public policy prescription for cities across the nation.

That said, Zimring concludes, in at least one city the explanation is clear: The New York City Police Department’s size, resources, use of statistical controls, and aggressive policing have combined to account for that city’s extraordinary crime reduction. Indeed, New York’s crime rate continues to decline, while–as I write this review in late December 2006–the FBI has reported that crime is rising in cities across the country. Thus Zimring’s thesis comes at a crucial moment–while he doesn’t provide solid answers, he knocks down simplistic theories that might serve to mislead policymakers as they once again confront the mystery of American crime rates.

It is important, in any discussion of crime rates, to ask what constitutes “crime.” Zimring, like most criminologists, examines FBI data (gathered nationally from police departments) on crimes with victims: homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, auto theft, and larceny. These data have two strengths. They allow comparison of trends through time and facilitate comparison of different parts of the United States and Canada. And they permit regression analysis, a statistical method of investigating the relationship between variables, here between crime and its possible causes.

But some cautions are also worth noting about Zimring’s data. They rarely extend beyond the year 2000. This makes his analyses less timely, but not necessarily less important. Nor does he analyze white-collar crime, which might well have increased during the economic boom of the 1990s. Nor can he–or any criminologist–accurately parse the rise and fall of consensual crimes, such as prostitution, or more importantly, drug-selling. Although drug-related crimes constitute a significant portion–as much as 40 percent–of arrests, convictions, and imprisonments in the United States, purchasers of drugs (or sex) rarely, if ever, have their transactions reported to the police. Consequently, there are no numbers to report, and most drug crime does not appear in the FBI crime rate. But drug crime does have a strong influence on the imprisonment rate, which may account for the seeming paradox of higher imprisonment even as the FBI index crime declines.

Setting these qualifications aside, the key contribution of Zimring’s book is not to prove a single theory of crime causation, but rather to show how difficult it is to isolate a single factor as a sufficient explanation. Look at the three most popular reasons for fluctuations in the crime rate: imprisonment, demography, and the economy. Among national and local legislators, lengthy sentences are justified for reasons of justice, incapacitation, and deterrence. Like most criminologists, Zimring does not deny that imprisonment is justifiable; however, he questions its marginal effectiveness. We need prisons, but do we require as many as we now have? Do we need such lengthy sentences? Imprisonment is expensive (prisoners may be one of the few groups with guaranteed health care), and especially, as under California’s capacious three-strikes law, it diverts funds from other public needs, such as education. Most of our sentencing policies, in fact, have nothing to do with policy analysis–rather, they are gut-level responses, as politicians don’t want to be susceptible to a charge of being “soft on crime.”

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