The Mystery of the Crime Decline

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/opinion/crime-decline-stop-and-frisk.html

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The reason for the plummeting of crime over the past three decades remains mostly a mystery. The national murder rate, for example, is about half what it was in 1990, and most of the theories explaining the decline are somewhere between incomplete and unpersuasive.

One of those theories has long been known as “broken windows” — the idea that by cracking down on minor forms of disorder, the police prevent worse behavior.

Over the last several years, New York City has conducted a natural experiment on a central tactic of the broken-windows strategy: stop-and-frisk. In 2011, New York’s police department conducted more than 685,000 stop-and-frisks — or nearly 2,000 a day — of people whom officers deemed suspicious. But the combination of a court order and the election of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who campaigned against the practice in 2013, have largely ended it.

During that 2013 campaign, the writer Kyle Smith — making an argument that was then widespread among conservatives — blasted de Blasio and the voters supporting him. “New Yorkers have evidently decided that the crime wave is over and it’s time to get lax about mayhem and disorder,” Smith wrote for Forbes.

As you probably know by now, I’m a fan of journalistic self-criticism, and Smith has engaged in some of it this week. His piece for National Review is called simply, “We Were Wrong About Stop-and-Frisk.” He notes that crime has continued to decline under de Blasio. “To compare today’s crime rate to even that of ten years ago is to observe a breathtaking decline,” Smith adds.

The vast majority of stop-and-frisks did little to reduce crime, it seems. They instead amounted to harassment of innocent New Yorkers, many of whom were African-American men. (This six-minute Op-Docs film, by Julie Dressner and Edwin Martinez, puts a human face on the toll. It focuses on a Brooklyn teenager named Tyquan who was stopped about once every month, for years.)

The demise of stop-and-frisk is worth celebrating. Its costs were clearly high, and its benefits now appear to have been tiny. But the larger mystery remains: What does explain a decline in crime that has improved life in almost every major city over the last few decades — and which almost nobody saw coming?

Related: If you still think there is an easy answer, read Matt Ford’s various debunkings in The Atlantic. And Jarvis DeBerry of The Times-Picayune argues that Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana should now stop advocating stop-and-frisk as the answer to New Orleans’s crime problems. Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post notes that Kennedy isn’t the only person still peddling stop-and-frisk.

Trump helping China, continued. From yesterday’s print edition of The Wall Street Journal: “Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said in an interview France was looking to China and Russia to act as a counterweight to increasingly uncertain trade relations with the U.S. and Britain.” (If you missed yesterday’s newsletter, it went into more detail on Trump’s gifts to China.)

It’s not just China. Susan Glasser argues in Politico that the president’s ignorance and volatility have already had real-world consequences for American national security and global leadership. “When it comes to Trump and the world,” she writes, “it’s not better than you think. It’s worse.”

On the positive side of foreign policy, Roger Cohen says Trump’s response to the Iran protests has been largely right.

Handouts. The historian Paul Sabin makes a good point about the recent Times op-ed calling for an end to many online retailers avoiding sales taxes. They are effectively enjoying a government subsidy that brick-and-mortar stores do not receive. Sabin compares this subsidy to the de facto government handouts that car companies have long enjoyed (and that other forms of transportation have not).

To say that online retailers are merely outcompeting traditional stores, Sabin suggests, is wrong.