In the late 1980s and early 1990s, things were about as bad as they could get in New York City. Roughly 2,000 residents were dying in homicides every year, far more than double the per capita rate of the United States as a whole. Public spaces, from the busy streets of downtown Manhattan to the dingy subway system, felt fundamentally out of control.
Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop; By Peter Moskos; Oxford University Press; 312 pp., $29.95
But then things improved at a rate no one could have thought possible. Homicides fell two-thirds in the Big Apple between 1993 and 1998, far faster than they fell elsewhere in the country. And while New York
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