In the late 1980s and early 1990s, things were about as bad as they could get in New York City. Roughly 2,000 residents were dying in homicides every year, far more than double the per capita rate of the United States as a whole. Public spaces, from the busy streets of downtown Manhattan to the dingy subway system, felt fundamentally out of control.
But then things improved at a rate no one could have thought possible. Homicides fell two-thirds in the Big Apple between 1993 and 1998, far faster than they fell elsewhere in the country. And while New York has never exactly been clean, the growing sense of public order was palpable to all who lived there, with some even complaining of a “Disneyfied” Times Square and the loss of New York City’s all-important seedy character.
Subsequent improvements have been more gradual, with some ground lost on occasion. But today, the striking reality is that America’s biggest city consistently has ahomicide rate lower than that of the country as a whole.
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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