Paper 2

Crime In New York City

Crime in the United States has been decreasing since 1990 till today. But in New York crime rates have been “dropping dramatically, even more then in the Untied States as a whole” (Franics). Since my class has been going into the city we have learned about the great history of New York and how places changed from the worst to what they are now. For example, “Bryant Park, in the heart of midtown and adjacent to the New York Library, was an open- air drug market; Grand Central Terminal, a gigantic flophouse; the Port Authority Bus Terminal, “a grim gauntlet for bus passengers dodging beggars, drunks, thieves, and destitute drug addicts,” as the New York Times put it in 1992” (Kelling). But when we got there Bryant Park is now a safe and beautiful park that you can go ice skating at, shop and have a great view of the Christmas tree and the Empire State building. The Grand Central Terminal we got to stop by it and saw that even though it was still packed the security and policing was enforced and the place was cleaned up. Also the Grand Central Terminal is building another railway to Long Island, and Grand Central Terminal will have to make sure its safe by upgrading there police presence.

What I have notice in the City is there are a lot of cops in vans driving around the area. I also see two cops walking on the street patrolling together and plenty of cameras too. They also have this new way of keeping us safe, they have an evaluated kind of house that one cop is in and is able to have a birds eye view of the surrounding blocks and if the police officer sees anything he radios it in to their partner on the ground. In both articles they talked about another technique of lowering crime in the city. This was broken window method. The broken window method is focusing on a area that crime is present in and putting more officers there to stop and or decrease the chances of crime happening. The idea of broken window is if you live in a house and a kid throws a rock at your window and you don’t call the police and leave the window like that. Then more kids will throw more rocks and breaks more of your windows. So putting police in neighborhoods that has crime will lower crimes. Francis Says in his article about broken windows is that the “approach does not deter as much crime as some advocates argue, but it does have an effect, particularly on robbery and motor vehicle theft.”

In Kellings article he suggested that the best way to lower crime was to have all the agencies and private agencies to work together instead of working against each other. “Rudy Giuliani understood the pent-up demand for public order and built his successful 1993 run for mayor on quality-of-life themes. Once in office, he appointed Bratton, who had orchestrated the subway success and understood the importance of order maintenance, as New York's police commissioner” (Kelling). With Mayor Giuliani and Bratton working together they came up with “tactical planning and accountability system”(Kelling) to lower crime in the city. When Mayor Giuliani and Commissioner Bratton got out of office, our current mayor Bloomberg and our current commissioner Kelly had “adopted, refined, and strengthened” (Kelling) this idea instead of doing it there own way. So the biggest reason crime went down you could say was Mayor Giuliani get tough on crime acts. Even today Bloomberg taking a little from Giuliani pushing for more random stop and frisk around the city, which is mostly to prevent people from walking around with guns and other illegal stuff.

Our class ran into many funny and scary situations that we probably all haven't really gotten into before. We all know that New York is a fast moving city and people like to get to point A and point B as fast as they can and most New Yorkers are short tempered. Our class was walking into Harlem after going into a store to look around and we came across this very weird guy screaming across the street at a girl in our class. He didn’t know her and he looked like he wasn’t all there but I could tell that our class was so confused about why and what he was yelling at us for. But to simply put it only in New York. Then he finally walked away and everything was fine but I found it funny seeing a cop car pass us 5 minutes after that had happen. Another time in our class we were walking to Time Square and we were about to cross the street and one of the girls were staring off and a lady just screams at her and says what are you looking out. These events happen plenty of the times in the city but I felt at ease because you can feel the police present all around you. If that man in Harlem wouldn’t of walked away the police would have been there to handle it, so the people of the city are well protected and I felt well protected.

From watching a lot of TV and movies and watching the news about New York it makes a person feel uneasy going to the city because they are thinking the worst is going to happen to them. But little do they know that since 1990 crime in the United States has been decreasing even though our country has the most guns in our homes. But little do they know how much New York crime has been dropping faster then the United States as a whole. When I first started my class I was a little worried about going into certain places that we were going to but now looking back and learning about how much crime has decreased and how the areas have dramatically changed, I realized I was worrying about nothing. Even though these two articles from Francis and Kelling didn’t talk about Gentrification I now know this plays place a great part in building up areas that are run down.

Francis, David R. "What Reduced Crime in New York City." The National Bureau of Economic Research. N.p., 16 Oct. 2012. Web. 17 Oct. 2012. http://www.nber.org/digest/jan03/w9061.html.

Kelling, George L. "How New York Became Safe: The Full Story." City Journal. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Oct. 2012. http://www.city-journal.org/2009/nytom_ny-crime-decline.html