The Broken Windows theory was fundamentally misunderstood and still is today.” — John Miller There’s a lot of talk about Broken Windows and crime prevention, both good and bad. And the concept features heavily in my book, Back from the Brink. But what does Broken Windows mean? How is it put into practice? How did it…
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From 1968 to 1973, there is an interesting (to put it mildly) and surprisingly little-remembered part of NYPD history. The “Stake-Out Squad.” I’ve spoken to a few cops who remember its existence. One who was part of it. It’s impossible to imagine this unit existing today. And even back that it was controversial…. but very…
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NYC subway murders from 1997-2020. There were 10 last year compared to zero in 2017. That’s an er, infinite(?) percent increase. We really had this under control until we permitted people to loiter and/or trespass in the subway system without consequence or ejection. That was a simple policy change directive issued to the Transit Police…
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In early 2021 I pointed out, which was a considered a radial concept by many at the time, that violence had indeed gone way up since the unrest following the murder of George Floyd. I wanted to update the data in that post about the relationship between enforcement (or lack thereof) and violence. So I…
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The recent increase in racial disparity in violence victims in NYC is getting worse. The disparity was always large. Nut now it’s worse. This year, through September, 1,430 New Yorkers have been shot. Five months between January and May, 366. Four months between June–September, 1,064. 1,064 is 2.6X compared to June–September last year. Over these…
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[Warning, this is a whole lot of nothing-burger in the end. But still, for those interesting in crime data, it might be worth reading.] Shootings are up so much in NYC that social scientists are left accusing the NYPD of “juking” the stats. Now I’ve been using NYPD data for a long time and compared…
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Betteridge’s law of headlines states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” I hope I’m wrong and Betteridge is right. This piece of mine was in the Daily News. Violence in New York is up. If you ask the NYPD, the 30-year New York City crime decline…
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George Kelling passed away on May 15, 2019. Kelling is best known as the (co-)author of Broken Windows, but his legacy is much greater than that. I met George Kelling in 1997 when I took a class from him while I was in the PhD program at Harvard University. In the early 1990s, Kelling described…
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