The New York Times published an article titled, “Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets,” by John Tierney on Friday, January 25, 2013. The article covered New York Cities unique and dramatic decrease in crime alongside its decrease in incarceration rates over the past several years. The trend is starkly different from that of the res of the country as national incarceration rates have skyrocketed. According to the Times, “The 2.3 million people behind bars in America, a fifth of the world’s prisoners, cost taxpayers more than $75 billion a year. The strict penal policies were intended to reduce crime, but they have led to a historic, if largely unrecognized, shift in priorities away from policing.” In contrast, the number of New York City residents in prison has dropped substantially, yet crime in the city has also dropped by more than 75 percent, “almost twice as much as the rest of the country.”
According to Michael Jacobson, a criminologist who ran the city’s Correction and Probation Departments during the 1990s and is currently president of the Vera Institute of Justice, “The precise causes of New York’s crime decline will be debated by social scientists until the Sun hits the Earth. But the 50,000-foot story from New York isthat you can drive down crime while decreasing your jail and prison population – and save a huge amount of money in the process.” By not following national trends regarding incarceration rates and in face lowering the number of imprisoned residents to below 40,000, the City of New York has been saving approximately $1.5 billion a year. This money has been redirected towards stronger policing. This redirection allowed New York to expand its police force during the early 1990s, incorporate a computerized system fro tracking crimes and complaints, and put officers on the beat to “aggressively [enforce] laws against guns, illegal drugs and petty crimes…Arrests for misdemeanors increased sharply. Yet Serious crime went down.” In fact, the $1.5 billion saved each year amounts to more than twice the cost to finance the additional officers brought on in the 1990s.
Other theories attribute the decrease in crime to new policing strategies such as hot-spot policing. Research on the strategy shows that the vast majority of crime is committed by one individual, and with computerized crime mapping, researchers and practitioners have discovered that “crime was even more concentrated by place than by person.” In fact, researchers discovered that half of a city’s crime took place in just about 5 percent of the urban area. Though originally met by skepticism among police officers and administrators, the hot spot strategy was adopted by New York in the 1990s and intensified in 2003 “with a program called Operation Impact, which was started…by Raymond W. Kelly, then and now the police commissioner.”
The article goes on to discuss the controversial “stop and frisk” strategy that the New York Police Department has mostly recently adopted as it relates to the historic decrease in crime in the city. The New York Times article will likely spark a more inclusive national dialogue related to policing and incarceration that is very prevalent and important in the work of the Municipal Planning Board Initiative and the Trenton Prevention Policy Board’s work. To read the full article, click here.
John Tierney. January 25, 2013. “Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets.” The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/nyregion/police-have-done-more-than-prisons-to-cut-crime-in-new-york.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hpw.