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Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City\u2019s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop\u00a0by Peter Moskos\u00a0
Oxford University Press, 312 pp.<\/p>\n
As he is sworn in today, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani takes office having already drawn a sharp line with the city\u2019s recent past, pledging, among other things, to end police sweeps of homeless encampments. This marks a clean break from the ethos of order maintenance policing that once defined New York\u2019s anti-crime strategies in the 1990s and early 2000s. When the outgoing mayor announced encampment sweeps in the spring of 2022, he gave voice to the same righteous indignation that animated that earlier era of law enforcement:\u00a0\u201cNo more smoking, no more doing drugs. No more sleeping, no more doing barbecues on the subway system. No more just doing whatever you want.\u201d\u00a0Mandami\u2019s reversal thus signals a deeper break with that past: less coercion, more compassion; less policing, more social policy. But as a recent book makes uncomfortably clear, this shift\u00a0might not merely be\u00a0bad policy. It\u00a0might well be\u00a0a grave mistake.<\/p>\n
Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City\u2019s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop\u00a0
by Peter Moskos\u00a0
Oxford University Press, 312 pp.<\/p>\n
Peter Moskos\u2019s\u00a0Back from the Brink<\/a>\u00a0is both oral history and urban epic\u2014a ground-level account of New York\u2019s astonishing, world-historical crime decline, narrated by the cops, commissioners, city officials, and civic leaders who tried, failed, improvised, and, in Moskos\u2019s telling, ultimately helped turn the city from a national cautionary tale into a global public safety success story. A Harvard-educated sociologist, former police officer, and current professor at John Jay College, Moskos stitches together a dense tapestry of personal recollections and hard-earned reflections to advance a simple, stubbornly controversial claim: Policing matters. No one puts the point more plainly than Louis Anemone, one of the NYPD\u2019s highest-ranking officials in the early 1990s: \u201cPolice can affect behavior. We really can.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For decades, academics and pundits have feuded over the so-called great crime decline. To be clear, the decline was real. Moskos opens with an astounding fact: Between 1990 and 1999, murders in New York City dropped by 70 percent, from 2,262 to 671. By 2018, the number had fallen below 300\u2014a result he calls \u201ca phenomenal achievement for an American city\u201d of more than 8 million people. In less than a generation, New York transformed from the cinematic dystopia of 1979\u2019s The Warriors into one of the safest major cities in the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n Between 1990 and 1999, murders in New York City dropped by 70 percent, from 2,262 to 671. By 2018, the number had fallen below 300\u2014a result Moskos calls \u201ca phenomenal achievement for an American city\u201d of more than 8 million people.<\/p>\n But crime also fell elsewhere: in Washington and Los Angeles, in Boston and Dallas, not just in New York. The decline was so dramatic that it birthed a cottage industry of explanation. Depending on whom you read, the great crime drop was about economics and demography\u2014a strong economy, an aging population, the waning of the crack markets. Or it was about mass incarceration and harsher sentencing. Or abortion access. Or lead concentration<\/a>. Or new technologies and security practices, from better car locks to ubiquitous surveillance cameras. And then, of course, there is policing: the rise of \u201ccommunity policing,\u201d hot-spots enforcement, performance management systems, and the whole family of \u201corder maintenance\u201d strategies associated\u2014fairly or not\u2014with \u201cbroken windows.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Many academics, policy makers, and journalists have soured on the broken windows theory, including other variants of order maintenance policing. Even Malcolm Gladwell\u2014perhaps the theory\u2019s best-known popularizer from his book The Tipping Point\u2014has recanted. \u201cHere\u2019s the thing I\u2019ve come to understand about the explanation I gave for why crime fell in New York,\u201d he said during a TED talk, 24 years after the book\u2019s release. \u201cI was wrong.\u201d In many parts of the academy, to suggest that policing, especially broken windows\u2013type strategies, played a major role in the crime drop is to endorse reactionary politics and sanction failed, racist approaches. The tendency has been to explain the great crime decline with anything\u00a0but\u00a0the work of cops on the street. To be clear, Moskos does not settle that argument. His book is not a statistical model or a grand unified theory of criminal justice. It is, instead, an unusually textured and contextualized effort to answer a narrower set of questions from the inside out: What did the crime decline look and feel like to the people who struggled through the city\u2019s near collapse and then helped drag it back from the brink?\u00a0<\/p>\n To appreciate Moskos\u2019s intervention, one must return to\u00a0the broken windows theory. In their now-classic essay, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling posed a question that sounded paradoxical at the time: How can a neighborhood feel \u201csafer\u201d even when the crime rate has not gone down\u2014or has even gone up? Their answer was that safety cannot be reduced to the FBI\u2019s index offenses. It is bound up instead with \u201cwhat most often frightens people in public places.\u201d As Wilson and Kelling observed, while people are certainly terrified by violence, they are often just as haunted by everyday encounters with \u201cdisreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.\u201d<\/p>\n Back from the Brink underscores just how deeply this theory shaped policing policy in the 1990s. Bill Bratton\u2014who, as transit police chief, launched a \u201cbroken windows\u201d strategy on the subway in 1990\u2014told Moskos that he embraced the approach because whenever he went into communities, he \u201cheard people complaining about broken windows.\u201d \u201cEven in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods\u2014they used to complain about crime, certainly\u2014but what I came to understand was that everyday people were seeing this crazy city and what a mess that was,\u201d Bratton said.<\/p>\n It is tempting to dismiss statements like this as self-serving, post hoc justification. But the survey evidence tells a strikingly similar story. A 1979 survey of residents in Harlem and the South Bronx underscores just how central quality-of-life concerns\u2014both physical decay and behavioral disorder\u2014were to the city\u2019s most marginalized communities. The single most frequently cited problem was bad or slum housing (29 percent), followed closely by drugs (25 percent) and crime and criminals (22 percent). In Harlem, these anxieties were sharper still: 32 percent identified bad housing as the top concern, 29 percent pointed to drugs, and 23 percent referred to crime. Beneath these headline categories sat a dense layer of everyday disorder. Robberies and muggings were cited by 12 percent of respondents citywide (15 percent in the Bronx), abandoned or burned-out housing by 11 percent overall (15 percent in the Bronx), and juvenile delinquency by 7 percent. Smaller but still telling shares pointed to littered streets (6 percent), vandalism (4 percent), lack of sanitation (4 percent), public drunkenness (2 percent), and fires (3 percent overall, rising to 6 percent in the Bronx)\u2014the very conditions that made public space feel unstable and threatening.<\/p>\n In many parts of the academy, to suggest that policing, especially broken windows\u2013type strategies, played a major role in the crime drop is to endorse reactionary politics and sanction failed, racist approaches.<\/p>\n Nearly a decade later, these concerns had not abated. Even as homicide rates continued to climb, a 1988 survey of New York State residents commissioned by the state\u2019s Division of Criminal Justice Services revealed the persistence\u2014and salience\u2014of quality-of-life anxieties. Nearly three-fifths of residents reported that their neighborhoods suffered from at least one \u201cquality of life\u201d problem: rowdy youth, homeless people, or crumbling buildings. Almost half complained about disorderly teenagers; nearly a third cited problems with homeless people; another third pointed to physical decay. As these problems accumulated, fear spiked. Only about one in 10 residents of trouble-free neighborhoods reported feeling unsafe out alone at night; among those living amid two or three major problems, that figure rose to nearly 60 percent.<\/p>\n Taken together, these numbers tell a story that crime rates alone cannot. Residents did not draw neat distinctions between \u201cserious crime\u201d and \u201cminor disorder\u201d; they experienced both as part of a single moral and environmental unraveling. The persistence of concerns about dirty streets, abandoned buildings, vandalism, and insufficient police protection\u2014often registering in double-digit shares in the hardest-hit neighborhoods\u2014helps explain why order maintenance policing resonated so deeply with the public. Fear was not produced by violence alone, but by the steady accumulation of visible signals that no one was in charge and by unwanted encounters with \u201cdisreputable,\u201d \u201cobstreperous,\u201d or \u201cunpredictable\u201d individuals, including \u201crowdy teenagers,\u201d drug users, and the homeless. In this view, \u201csafety\u201d\u2014or at least the perception of it\u2014was secured as much through the removal of these perceived threats as through declining crime rates. That, at least, is a key claim Moskos\u2019s book presses with unusual force.<\/p>\n One of Moskos\u2019s interviewees, Steve Hill, a transit cop, gets to the heart of the matter with disarming clarity. Order maintenance, he explains, was \u201cmore about acknowledging the things that made people feel unsafe,\u201d even if \u201cthe violent predators are still going to be out there shooting and killing people.\u201d It sounds like a concession, but it is the opposite. Hill is insisting that reducing fear, reclaiming public space, and pushing back disorder matter in their own right\u2014not because they shave a few points off homicide rates, but because they reshape how ordinary New Yorkers experience the city.<\/p>\n Hill\u2019s stories make that point concrete. He recalls a morning train disrupted by a homeless man \u201cpissing,\u201d shouting, and driving passengers \u201ccrazy,\u201d until an officer seized the moment\u2014\u201c\u2018This is your stop, buddy.\u2019 Boom!\u201d\u2014and threw him onto the platform. \u201cNo paperwork,\u201d Hill notes, and as the doors closed \u201cthe entire train applauded.\u201d The applause is key. It captures a public worn down by daily disorder and viscerally grateful when someone finally intervened. Elsewhere, Hill recalls how riders at Utica Avenue during rush hour were \u201chappy to see\u201d an officer in uniform. For every person who cursed or spit, he observed, \u201cten others will appreciate you being here.\u201d What people valued was not abstract crime control, but the simple assurance that they could sit on a train without worrying about \u201csomebody crazy walking up on them, spitting or littering or urinating or defecating.\u201d<\/p>\n Reducing fear, reclaiming public space, and pushing back disorder matter in their own right\u2014not because they shave a few points off homicide rates, but because they reshape how ordinary New Yorkers experience the city.<\/p>\n Again, the book is not content to rest with the modest claim that police intervention and the removal of disorder merely makes people\u00a0feel\u00a0safer. Its ambitions are higher. Moskos presses a stronger argument that the diligent work of the beat cop, the creativity and vision of police leaders like Bratton, and the political buy-in of elected officials such as Mayor Rudy Giuliani made the city safer in real terms\u2014not just perceived ones. Given the scale of the policing revolution described by his interviewees and observed by their contemporaries, this is hardly unreasonable.<\/p>\n What the interviews reveal is not simply a retrospective defense of the broken windows theory but a set of institutional and managerial reforms that reshaped how policing actually functioned on the ground. When Bratton returned to New York City as police commissioner in 1994, \u201cbroken windows\u201d meant the systematic enforcement of quality-of-life offenses, paired with a genuine managerial overhaul. Bratton\u2019s team worked aggressively to make officers more efficient and effective, but the real engine of change was CompStat\u2014a data-driven police management system that uses frequent crime statistics reviews to hold commanders accountable and rapidly deploy resources to where they are most needed. As one commander recalls, \u201cThis philosophy of CompStat is what really changed the direction of the ship.\u201d Many outsiders, she notes, mistook CompStat for \u201ca session or an event,\u201d when in fact \u201cit\u2019s a philosophy\u201d\u2014nothing less than \u201ca sea change.\u201d The shift was about \u201cholding commanders accountable and letting them take ownership of their command\u201d: demanding leadership, encouraging officers to be \u201cinnovative and creative,\u201d to \u201cuse good judgment,\u201d and to act with \u201ca moral compass\u201d and \u201cthe highest level of integrity.\u201d By introducing real-time crime tracking and mandatory, high-pressure accountability sessions, Bratton forced precinct commanders to know their numbers, explain their strategies, and adjust tactics quickly. Policing moved from reactive to preventive, from anecdote to constant measurement, and from diffuse responsibility to personal accountability.<\/p>\n Although a former cop, Moskos is no cheerleader for the NYPD, nor is he immune to two decades of scholarship critical of the origins and character of modern policing, or to the department\u2019s own checkered history. After Bratton\u2019s departure, evidence emerged<\/a> that cops and precinct captains in the NYPD were \u201cjuking the stats<\/a>\u201d under the system\u2019s relentless pressure to show results\u2014and that turned out to be true of other cities<\/a> that adopted it, as anyone who has watched The Wire<\/a> knows. The book is clear-eyed about corruption and racism in the department\u2014though it is worth noting that some of the most objectionable tactics, including stop-and-frisk, also emerged years after Bratton\u2019s departure. What Moskos ultimately offers, then, is not a whitewash of the institution, but a far sharper sense of the people involved\u2014their backgrounds, personal quirks, professional goals, and moral commitments\u2014as they struggled, imperfectly, to make New York City a safer place.<\/p>\n It is the convergence of an emergent theory of crime (and fear) and novel managerial techniques and technologies\u2014alongside a shared, ardent devotion to tackling the \u201cmess\u201d the city had become\u2014that anchors the book\u2019s central causal claim about the crime drop. Beyond such firsthand testimony, however, Back from the Brink does not attempt a systematic causal test linking these strategies\u2014or the particular individuals who implemented them\u2014to the precipitous decline in violent crime and the resurgence of public safety. What it offers instead is something different, and no less consequential: a richly documented account of how those closest to the work understood what they were doing, why they believed it mattered, and how order, safety, and legitimacy came to be rebuilt together on the ground by policing\u2014and why that rebuilding mattered to New Yorkers, especially those living in the city\u2019s most disadvantaged areas.<\/p>\n As Mayor Mamdani\u2019s recent announcement ending sweeps of homeless encampments suggests, New York City may now be witnessing the final retreat from the order maintenance policing that once dominated the city. Many will applaud this development. But before turning his back entirely on that past, the new mayor would do well to consult Back from the Brink. Moskos\u2019s achievement is not that he has solved the riddle of the 1990s. It is that he has listened\u2014carefully and patiently\u2014to the people who were on the job as New York fumbled its way back to something like order, and that he has treated their perceptions, like those of the citizens they served, as social realities worth considering rather than dismissing.<\/p>\n Ultimately,\u00a0Moskos\u2019s book\u00a0is less a brief for any particular policy package than a reminder that crime statistics and police strategies are only part of the story. The rest lives in memory: of parks once abandoned and now busy; of stairwells once haunted and now quiet; of officers once derided who, for all their flaws, made people feel that someone finally cared whether their block was a place to hurry through or a place to live. That is not the whole of justice. Certainly, those deemed \u201cdisreputable,\u201d \u201cobstreperous,\u201d or \u201cunpredictable\u201d deserve their own measure of peace and dignity. But it is a piece of justice\u2014and of politics\u2014that we ignore at our peril.<\/p>\n \n\tRelated\n<\/p>\n
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