• tal@lemmy.today
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    10 months ago

    My understanding – and I’m not a New Yorker – was that he has been often credited with reducing crime in NYC. Part of that was, as I recall, by cracking down on minor crimes, things like aggressive panhandling, with the idea that that was kind of a gateway drug to more-severe crime.

    I don’t know whether that approach or him in particular was responsible for it, or whether it was other phenomena at the time – my gut is that changes like that usually aren’t just driven by one person – but my understanding was that crime did considerably fall off around the time, and crime was something that a lot of New Yorkers had been really upset about.

    • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      It was mostly due to work by Giuliani’s predecessor, David Dinkins. I wrote a longer comment about it.

      The ‘broken windows’ theory was really an excuse to put black and brown people in jail for minor crimes. People still hop the turnstiles, but that’s not the real source of crime.

      Look at the overall economics of the period, once Reagan was gone and the people in NYC could start getting jobs again… What’s attractive about being a criminal? It’s hard, and there’s always the chance someone’s got a dagger or pistol on them.