It seemed like a classic New York crime drama, pitting cops against bad guys in a game of life and death played out against a grim urban cityscape. But scenes such as last week's emotional drama at the Bronx Supreme Court are now most remarkable for their rarity. The truth is simple: New York has cracked crime.
The image of a heaving sea of vice and violence, plagued by racial tensions and corrupt City Hall politics, is out of date. That New York belongs only in the literature and films it inspired: The Bonfire of the Vanities, Serpico, A Bronx Tale. The figures speak for themselves. In 1990, 2,245 New Yorkers were murdered. Last year the number was 537, the lowest for 40 years. Figures for other crimes have also plummeted. Eight precincts, including the once notorious Central Park, recorded no violent deaths last year. Rape, assault, theft and muggings have all seen steep drops in the last 15 years. 'Something remarkable has happened in New York,' said David Kennedy, head of the centre for crime prevention and control at Manhattan's John Jay College.
Places once considered no-go areas have been gentrified and boast property prices among the most expensive in America. The subway system, once terrifying, is now a model of safety. Street crimes such as muggings have become rare in many places where they were once endemic. It is an experience that cities around the world have been desperate to mimic, but none has so far succeeded. Some say New York's experience is unique. 'Nothing like it has happened in criminology. We don't even have a word for it,' said Andrew Karmen, author of a book on the subject called New York Murder Mystery.
It used to be very different. In 1977 New York had a terrible summer. Looting and arson had broken out in the wake of a power blackout. The Son of Sam serial killer stalked the streets. Racial tension was everywhere. During a Yankees baseball game, as a huge factory went up in flames, a TV commentator on the match, remarked famously: 'There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.'
The phrase came to sum up a city in crisis. It was an image common in popular culture. The 1979 cult film The Warriors told of a street gang's epic voyage across SoHo, Chinatown and Coney Island battling rival thugs on the way. Eight years later Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities depicted an Eighties city where a wrong turn off the motorway by a rich white banker triggered a chain of violence marred by racially-charged politics.
Now the only danger the Warriors would face in SoHo would be from an overpriced latte; Chinatown's main threat is not gang warfare, but it might be food poisoning; and the Bronx is not burning much - parts of it are booming. The wave of gentrification has transformed neighbourhoods once regarded as slums into the haunts of celebrities. In the Seventies Al Pacino's tough film cop Frank Serpico lived in down and dirty Greenwich Village. Now the neighbourhood is home to Carrie Bradshaw from TV's Sex and the City. Serpico would not be able to afford the rent.
Latest figures show New York's violent crime rate dropped by 2.8 per cent in 2005, almost six times the national average. In Manhattan the annual murder rate has dipped below 100 for the first time since the 19th century. New York is now the safest of America's 25 largest cities, ahead of places such as San Diego and Dallas. Out of America's 227 cities with a population of at least 100,000, New York's crime rate ranks 211.
Many experts believe the strongest reason for the transformation is also the most obvious: better policing. Dubbed 'zero tolerance' by the media and politicians, police embarked on a strategy in the Nineties aimed at cutting big crime by stamping out small crime. It was a theory summed up in the idea that, if you refused to tolerate vandalism and breaking windows, you could improve a neighbourhood and discourage more serious criminals from operating. By the end of the decade this concept was being mimicked across America and the rest of the world, including parts of Britain.
But the truth is far more complex. 'There is no such thing as zero tolerance. It can't be done and the NYPD never tried it,' said Kennedy. In fact, New York's tougher attitude to small-scale crime was coupled with a revamp of policing. Better training was introduced, the best officers were put into positions of management and a revolutionary new computer system, dubbed CompStat, was brought in. This allowed the police to make hi-tech maps of crime hotspots so that they could target them quickly. 'Everybody likes a simple idea like zero tolerance. But the reality is far more subtle,' said Kennedy.
The police action may have triggered a virtuous cycle. As crime fell, gentrification occurred, causing crime to fall again. It has continued downwards, even though police numbers were recently cut. In other American cities the crime rate is steady or has begun to climb. Alongside the changed tactics came a fall in the crack epidemic that had swept the city in the Eighties. By the Nineties police had driven dealers off the streets, thus reducing drug-related violence.
Police tactics have followed the same pattern. Recently the New York Police Department launched Operation Trident in some of the most troublesome precincts. This involved splitting each into three and flooding the streets with police. It is reaping benefits. Trident was carried out last year in the infamous 75th Precinct, a grim 5.5 square miles of eastern New York; serious crime dropped 12 per cent.
Although the fall in crime is often attributed to the actions of former mayor Rudy Giuliani and his head of police, William Bratton, it has continued long after they have left office. Giuliani's successor, Mike Bloomberg, and his new police chief, Ray Kelly, have presided over the continuing slide. Both have also reaped the benefits, with Bloomberg - a Republican in a overwhelmingly Democratic city - recently winning re-election in a landslide. The optimistic mood was summed up by Bloomberg in his New Year's Day address. Flanked by his daughters, he vowed to continue the crime fall by cracking down on guns. 'We will never turn back nor hold back,' he said at a ceremony that began with schoolchildren playing 'New York, New York' and ended with Liza Minnelli belting out a song.
Amazingly, the city seems so safe to many of its citizens that there is now even a strand in its collective consciousness that feels nostalgic for the old days. New York's cherished self-image is tied up with toughness and being streetwise. 'There was a wildness in New York and that's been tamed, and perhaps something was lost,' said Jonathan Mahler, author of a study of Seventies New York, which was a surprise hit last year and reflected a fascination with the city's more torrid past.
But New York is not yet a crime-free paradise. No one knows that better than Pastor Stephen Pogue. The charismatic preacher runs the Greater Hood church in Harlem that has become famous for its Hip Hop Choir, using popular black music to keep young teenagers off the streets.
As a beat fills the church, packed with young people clapping and singing, Pogue sways energetically along with the music. He knows that, whatever the overall crime statistics say, the streets of Harlem are still tough. His kids still face the dangers of drugs, gangs and crime. 'We use this choir to help people who need help. Without this, a lot of these kids could be getting in trouble,' he said. Pogue and others believe it is not only the police who fight crime. Some experts agree. They believe that the simple message of 'zero tolerance' is so powerful that it has been used by the media and politicians to boost their careers at the expense of the root causes of the fall in crime. Police unions have complained of pressure to boost statistics artificially.
Karmen believes many factors other than tough policing have come into play. He points out that police moves to imprison more criminals began in the Eighties with little impact on crime rates, which only began to fall in the Nineties. He also shows that CompStat was brought in only after the fall in crime had begun. He says an investment in education in the Nineties helped, putting many young men into college rather than on the streets: 'Even if they did not complete their courses, it put them on a campus for the stormy years of their early twenties.'
Other issues included a wave of immigration that began in the Nineties, following several decades when people were more likely to leave than arrive in the Big Apple. Karmen argues that newly arrived immigrants were far more likely to be law-abiding and hard-working than native populations. It was they, not just the police, who moved into tough areas and transformed them. He also believes a combination of Aids among drug users, the deadliness of crack and the murder boom of the Eighties removed as many as 43,000 criminals from the streets.
But others warn that it is too easy to get carried away by New York's success. The fact remains that the crime rate is still high by European standards. In Britain there were only 858 violent criminal deaths in 2004, more than in New York, but one is a city, the other a nation.
While much of New York has gentrified, vast swathes have not. 'It is a work in progress,' said Mahler. Large areas of the Bronx, northern Manhattan, Queens and eastern Brooklyn are still deeply deprived areas. Violence is still all too common. Last week a Brooklyn school announced it would be keeping its pupils indoors at break times because of three shootings in the streets. Some studies show that about one in four New Yorkers lives at or below the poverty line. In any study of crime levels, these facts cannot be ignored. 'I travel to Britain and I have never seen in London any area that is as bad as the worst parts of New York. Not even close,' said Fred Siegel, a crime expert and the author of a book on Giuliani called The Prince of the City.
Therefore, while no one argues that what has happened is not remarkable, few are willing to draw hard lessons. Some cities that have copied New York's intensive police methods, such as Baltimore and Philadelphia, have had little success. Others, including Los Angeles and Boston, have done much better. But none has managed to replicate the continual downward trend of New York.
Even proponents of the view that better policing is behind New York's triumph warn against other cities taking too much direct inspiration. 'Don't get seduced by ideas of zero tolerance,' Kennedy said. 'It is much more complex than that, especially in a city with a complicated ethnic and social mix. Jumping in with two feet would be the way to blow up a community like that.'
Yet all agree something amazing has happened. Karmen has called for a special commission, perhaps even appointed by President George Bush, to try to work out what has caused it. So far this has not happened. 'It is a scandal that we are not looking at this properly. It is too valuable a thing not to want to understand it,' he said.
