What came first: the crime, or the recession?

A recent nytimes article ascertains that crime is still going down, though resists overturning the conception that hard times lead to desperate measures.

But crime statistics and people’s feelings about public safety “are not perfectly correlated,” Professor Smith said.

“People have had this longtime misconception that crime came down in New York City because the economy improved, and I have been telling people that it is just the reverse — the economy improved after crime went down,” Professor Smith said. “Hotel occupancy went up after crime went down. Airport arrivals went up after crime went down. Employment went up after crime went down.”

Ah, the chicken or the egg question. Both Prof. Smith and the other expert cited have a vested interest in the policing methods of the NYPD (the former studies said methods, the latter is a police historian and retired cop from Chicago), so rather unsurprisingly, they chalk it up to the methods: CompStat (tracking crimes, basically. Who knew stats could help police?), and the broken windows theory (the slippery slope for crimes. First comes the graffiti, then the murders). Click the link for the criticisms of broken windows: NYC's drop in crime rate matched that of cities where there was no such effort underway, of zero tolerance for misdemeanors. However, this study does make an interesting point that cleaning up areas and improving the physical appearance of an area does quite a bit (and which ties back into one aspect of the broken windows theory: persecute the petty criminals who "degrade" the city, whether through graffitti or jumping subway turnstyles or squeeging the windshields of motorists).

And, seriously, "demographic changes" (aka gentrification, or white in-flight), and the subsiding of the crack epidemic were a little out of the hands of the NYPD...

The article has deeper issues: in the first part of the quote, the report cites a key distinction, then procedes to completely ignore it: actual crime versus the perception of crime. (As well as a historical distinction: the sources of income cited come mostly from tourists, i.e., non-residents.) Areas with broken windows seem more dangerous. Fix the windows, perhaps stop people from breaking more windows, and in the meantime, the area will be perceived as safer.

In general, people consider what they know to be safer than what they don't know; subway surveys report this year after year--people feel safer in familiar settings, on their own lines.

I would argue that New York may prove more resilient, because of a shift in residency patterns. Rather than fleeing cities, cities have become the place to live. So unless things get really bad, for a long time, then NYC will be okay.

The real question is subjective, for this depends on what people feel: how bad is too bad? and how long is too long?

(And wouldn't out-of-towners not be traveling anyway, because a vacation moves out of reach? These people would be more likely to consider the City to be more dangerous, since it's exotic and unfamiliar. So perhaps tourism would drop. But that doesn't mean terrible things, unless you love love LOVE Time Square right now.)