“It is not that crime must be low for a city to work, but that a city must work for crime to be low,” write John K. Roman and Elizabeth Glazer in an article for the policy journal The Vital City entitled, “The Golden Age of Crime Reduction Is Now.”
“The variation in crime rates among cities — a variation masked by the overall downward national trend — can tell a lot about how well a city works," they write. "Population decline, the loss of a tax base, the inability to manage a police force to solve crimes — all are all pieces of the intricate puzzles that make up crime rises and falls.”
Over the past generation, Roman and Glazer write, policymakers and academics have learned that the most successful criminal systems should be “focus(ed) on interventions that synchronize with the forces that make cities vibrant, rather than treating crime and justice as a separate problem.”
The article’s writers have a long history in examining crime and policy within cities. Glazer, who founded Vital City, is a former federal prosecutor and a justice advisor for a New York City mayor and a New York governor. Roman, a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago, serves as the co-Director of the National Prevention Science Coalition and has examined crime rates over decades.
The violent crime rate for the first quarter of 2024 was 323.6 per 100,000, which is the lowest violent crime rate in 55 years, since 1969. Crime in New York City, and across the nation, is at one of the lowest points in our history. First quarter of 2024 preliminary FBI statistics shows the homicide rate in the United States, as of April 1, 2024, is 4.5 per 100,000. For comparison, the homicide rate was 6.8 per 100,000 at the peak of the pandemic and 5.1 per 100,000 at the beginning of the pandemic.
The authors say that part of this is “a dawning recognition that the causes of crime are many, so the solutions must be too.” But the other part goes beyond police – and is rooted in the way a city is built and how its people thrive, or struggle, Glazer and Roman write.
“Issues of structure, governance and pure geography can undergird whether a city improves or not. Segregation can mark a city and crowd disadvantage into some quarters, making it harder and harder to find opportunity. Barriers to opportunity can be as literal as a highway bisecting a city; concentrations of lead at appallingly high rates in poor neighborhoods depress school achievement. … Places that have welcomed large numbers of people from other countries seem to have been more successful in reducing crime and violence, since foreign-born people commit crimes less often than native-born people.”
To best manage risk and control behavior, which is how crime is reduced, Roman and Glazer point to efforts with success supported by research: “Randomized controlled trials in New York City housing projects show that lighting reduces nighttime felony crime by 36% — not in a generation, but right now. Other high-quality evidence shows that remediating buildings, providing enhanced summer youth employment, tutoring algebra in ninth grade and many other efforts have a significant and sustained impact on crime and the quality of urban life.”