Crime in Inspector Thomas Galati’s square mile of the Bronx keeps falling, just as it has in the rest of the city.
Crime is dropping in the 46th Precinct, Galati said, because of the pressure the Police Department’s vaunted analysis and accountability system puts on Galati’s bosses, on him and on the more than 200 officers who work under him.
“Being that I’m accountable for everything, I have to make everybody else accountable,” Galati said. Every day he worries over his precinct’s crime statistics.
“We’re always up against last year’s numbers,” he said.
New York’s huge 10-year drop in crime has become the envy of every big-city police department in the country. The statistics have spawned several imitations of NYPD’s tactics, including in Chicago and Los Angeles, but no city has matched its success. In the last decade, murder in New York has decreased by about 70 percent.
Last year, when Chicago police abandoned a politically controversial plan of shifting beat cops from economically stable, safe neighborhoods to violent areas, the top brass said they instead were buying into a New York-like strategy.
While Chicago police hope some day to replicate New York’s statistics, experts point out that the two cities’ crime problems are very different. Chicago’s street violence is driven principally by gangs that have solved their problems with guns for decades, experts say.
In New York, gangs have never been as organized, and street-based drug dealing has not been a large problem for more than a decade, said Andrew Karmen, a sociologist who studies New York crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The 46th Precinct is one of the highest crime neighborhoods in the city. Drugs are a big problem, especially for the muggings, burglaries and robberies committed by junkies supporting their habits. But murders haven’t been the 46th’s biggest problem for several years. In 1995 there were 43 murders. Last year there were eight, and it’s been four years since there were more than 20, statistics show.
Galati said he believes in the “broken windows” approach to policing, which goes hand in hand with NYPD’s sophisticated system of crime statistics and strategic analysis, CompStat. Under broken windows, officers are urged to enforce every law on the books, from urinating in public to loitering, with the belief that people who commit small crimes also commit more serious offenses.
The approach is not without controversy. Karmen has been among the leading critics of the department’s methods. He said the rate of crime reduction has more to do with changing social conditions and demographics, and people are now more afraid of the police.
“If huge numbers … have to be stopped to find a few guns and weapons, [the community] becomes alienated,” he said.
But for NYPD officials, the proof is in the results. And the challenge is to keep adapting the way they fight crime.
One method of stopping crime this year may be outdated next year, or might work in one neighborhood and not another, said Deputy Commissioner Garry McCarthy, who oversees CompStat.
“There’s no magic bullet. There’s no one thing that’s going to reduce murders,” he said. “It’s a hundred things that play into it. You’ve got to keep reinventing what you’re doing.”
