Eight Steps to Reduce Crime
Eight Steps to Reduce Crime
William J. Bratton and William Andrews, two U.S. policing experts, propose a new strategy for Latin America in the Spring 2010 issue of Americas Quarterly.
Twenty years ago, U.S. citizens had lost confidence in our ability to control crime and disorder on the streets of our cities. Urban crime had been rising steadily since the 1960s, and by the late 1980s, violent crime appeared to be taking off at an accelerating rate.
The lethal combination of lucrative narcotics markets driven by crack, heroin and methamphetamine, the increasing number of drug-addicted young people engaging in crime, as well as the ready availability of handguns, assault rifles and other automatic weapons caused an explosion of violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There were about 675,000 more violent crimes in the United State in 1992 than there had been in 1983. Criminal justice theorists were throwing up their hands. Political leaders and even some police chiefs were saying that police departments could not be expected to have any significant effect on crime or to regain control of the situation.
Indeed, many experts who viewed demographic forces as a key factor driving crime were predicting a new generation of crime-prone youth who would push crime rates ever higher.
Yet over the past 20 years, the U.S. reversed these trends. New York City, for instance, is recording crime rates in recent years comparable to the rates of the 1960s. Murders are down from 2,245 in 1990 to 471 in 2009, and the city has just completed its 19th year of consecutive declines in the major crime categories. The crimes most frequently committed by repeat and career criminals—robbery, burglary and auto theft—are down 81 percent, 82 percent and nearly 93 percent, respectively. In the nation as a whole, the violent crime rate has fallen from 758 per 100,000 residents in 1991 to 445 in 2008, and the murder rate is down from 9.8 to 5.4 per 100,000 residents.
Read the full text of the article at www.AmericasQuarterly.org.
William Bratton has served as New York City Police Commissioner and chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. William Andrews has worked with Mr. Bratton for 20 years in police agencies and in police consulting and served as special assistant to Mr. Bratton at the NYPD.
