Chicago Can Learn About Crime Reduction from New York - NYTimes.com

Chicago Can Learn About Crime Reduction from New York - NYTimes.com

"Chicago gnashed its teeth as the New York Giants won the Super Bowl.

It should do the same over crime.

More notable than the Giants’ unforeseen playoff run is a stunning decline in crime in New York that shatters many assumptions about law enforcement and could serve as a road map for Chicago.

It explains why Franklin E. Zimring, a criminal justice expert at the University of California, Berkeley, will headline an A-list symposium hosted by the University of Chicago Crime Lab on Friday. His new book, “The City That Became Safe,” (Oxford University Press, 2012), is mostly about New York, but it should be required reading for policy makers and nervous citizens here.

“We thought the only way to reduce crime was to lock people up,” Mr. Zimring said. “In New York, incarceration went down and crimes went down.”

For the past century, ups and downs in crime have fit a pattern nationwide. In the early 1990s there was a sharp rise amid a crack cocaine epidemic, and New York and Chicago had strikingly similar crime rates.

The fluctuations gave birth to a powerful conventional wisdom that law-enforcement strategies couldn’t have much impact, noted Roseanna Ander, executive director of the crime lab.

Poverty, inequality, racism, drug use and gang wars were cited as root causes that couldn’t really be overcome by even the most vigilant beat officers. If there was a consensus, it was simple and macho: arrest more people and lock ’em up.

But New York is lapping Chicago and nearly every big city by any index one inspects. The homicide rate alone in New York is about one-third of Chicago’s. And New York’s incarceration rates have fallen rapidly even as robbery, burglary, auto theft, larceny, rape and assault rates have declined faster than elsewhere.

Mr. Zimring, a former University of Chicago law school professor, has exhaustively analyzed New York’s dramatic drop over the past 20 years. He scrutinized factors like economic inequality, children in single-parent homes, accessibility to guns, immigration patterns, you name it. He dissected patterns like heavy immigration by Asians, who have low crime rates, and New York’s persistently higher youth unemployment and poverty rates.

Nothing really seems to account for New York’s differences other than increases in police resources and strategies focused on serious crime, and not, according to Mr. Zimring, the often mythologized “quality of life,” or so-called “broken windows” strategies that concentrate on, say, public prostitution or gambling.

Thus, limiting drug violence by shutting open-air drug markets proved to be a far bigger and smartly executed priority than chasing hookers.

All that is relevant to Chicago since Garry F. McCarthy, the new police superintendent, is a product of the New York Police Department. Mr. McCarthy, who will join Mr. Zimring at the symposium on Friday, most recently led the police force in another crime-plagued city, Newark, and introduced New York’s now-famous Compstat system there. For sure, to read “The City That Became Safe” is to wonder if duplication here might bring salvation, even if the author himself is uncertain about some elements.

Mr. McCarthy has made Compstat, a process of data mapping and analysis, a crucial part of Chicago’s crime-fighting campaign.

In Compstat sessions, local commanders must go into granular detail about recent crimes and face tough but fair-minded questioning from bosses."