November 27, 2001
From the desk of Jane Galt:Newsflash: More Police Means Fewer
Newsflash: More Police Means Fewer Criminals
An editorial in the New York Post points out the surge in crime in New York since the September 11th attacks. No, this isn't due to the trauma of the disaster forcing otherwise law-abiding citizens to commit armed robbery in order to work off a little existential angst; the Post's (plausible) argument is that crime has dropped because the police are off hunting terrorists or working security details instead of fighting ordinary crime, and the criminals know it.
One of the hardest problems for those arguing that Giuliani (and the style of policing that his commissioners favored) was actually responsible for the drop in crime that has fostered the resurgance of New York. There were always other factors -- demographics, for example (a drop in the number of teenage boys) that his detractors dragged out, with some justification.
Now we have what amounts to a controlled experiment. We had a lot of police, now we don't. Crime has gone up. Surprise, surprise -- enforcement really does matter.
But we paid a terrible price to learn it.
Posted by Jane Galt at November 27, 2001 10:07 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links