Volume 44, Number 13 · August 14, 1997
Can You Believe the New York Miracle?
By James Lardner
Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities
by George L. Kelling, by Catherine M. Coles
Martin Kessler Books/Free Press, 319 pp., $25.00
Crime measurement, like crime-fighting, has been a shaky business for years. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was customary for municipal officials in Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and New York, among other cities, to grossly underreport their crime statistics. And the habit was hard to break; increased honesty, after all, could easily be mistaken for increased crime. It could be, and, according to Above the Law, David Burnham's illuminating study of the US Department of Justice, eventually it was. With the advent of 911 emergency telephone systems, in the late Sixties and the Seventies, the act of reporting became easier for the public and the act of suppressing statistics harder for the police—and crime soared. While some of the growth was undoubtedly real, some, Burnham suggests, was not.[1] Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation, our self-appointed national crime scorekeeper, acknowledged the potential for confusion; that is, the functionaries who published the Bureau's uniform crime reports acknowledged it. Meanwhile, the FBI's leaders, beginning with J. Edgar Hoover, eagerly promoted the idea of a terrifying increase in crime. Like the CIA's inflated estimates of Soviet military might, it was good for business.
Review, 5452 words
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