The question is, what happened?
On Aug. 7 2005 I posted "A Quick Study" of this same history of murder rates in New York State. The relatively sudden and very final end to 'the great crimewave' that started with the ghetto uprisings in the 60's, is a dramatic example of dynamic cultural change. It began with a very public change of heart, that inner-city black youth, primarily, used their new freedoms to reject society, and after many tumultuous years ended in an almost completely silent, but equally dramatic change of heart to end it.
(click on image for source data site)
12/29/09The
strong indicator that a cultural change occurred is the regular decay
curve marking a shift from high and variable murder rates, to low and and
completely flat rates, the collapse of the murder rate and beginning of a distinct period of quiet,
that has now continued through 2009. That marks a
clear 'change of state', and not the kind of thing caused by police pressure in
a wild town like New York. When you look closely at the data for
each borough (below) it appears that in each one there was a specific intense
crime spree that was "over the top" and tipped the balance causing each
neighborhood to somewhat abruptly reject the virulent crime culture that raged
in their midst at the time, and simply stop giving their sons and daughters to
it. That's a little speculative, yes, but supported by many kinds of
indications, including that the drop in crime rates that followed was as
precipitous and permanent. It was as if at that peak moment the drug
warriors the police kept sweeping off the streets endlessly, just abruptly
stopped being replaced. That's the meaning of a rapid decay curve
here, a distinct sudden absence of resupply.
02/23/08 Another 'sneaky' indication, is, well, that
it was so sneaky. No one noticed it happening. There
was even a notable mayor who came into office three years after the collapse
began and claimed credit for the whole change of character in the city. There's really no outside factor yet identified,
though, that
matches the timing, or finality, of the change. There's no outside
cause to explain the more or less sudden
relief from a long persistent culture of violence which every possible effort
was targeting to end for a great many years. In the various news accounts
and studies I've read one of the odd consistencies is that no one seems to have asked the
people involved what they thought happened. So I went out and did a
number of interviews on the streets of Harlem and the Bronx to see if
people remembered what it was. There may be other scientists
who have done so, but I have not read about it. (http://www.synapse9.com/cw/cw_interview_notes_10-22_audio.pdf)
The study was not meant to be exhaustive, and but to explore my method with a
minimal amount of effort, to see if some better questions would come out of it.
It certainly is only one data
set, but does expose an unheard from inside point of view. I just handed out a
blow-up of the curve asking "were you around here in the 90's", and "do you
remember what happened here", leading people as little as I could until they
offered
something they remembered happening that they associated with it. The text file contains
brief notes reflecting 50 good conversations with people, four audio file links,
and my compilation of the reasons people gave. It's always great to get out and
talk to people, and one rarely has something to ask them that is so central to
their own lives and mysterious at the same time. Judge for yourself. Naturally I
described what I could make sense of, introducing some of my own perceptions in
the process, but I tried to just record the story tellers.
Often the picture you see in a data set
depends on how you aggregate the data. Among the questions that
can't be answered from the Statewide data in the curve above, from a systems
point of view, is whether every city in the state had the same
trend as the aggregate (all of them together), and particularly whether the
turning points for each city were at the same time, or in sequence. That
would suggest or rule out several paths of causation. When I got
more detailed data it came in the form of murder rates for each of the 75
precincts in NY City, and did not include those for the upstate cities, so that
line of inquiry couldn't be followed. I then spent a lot of
unproductive time looking at the citywide distribution of rates of all the
precincts, and found all the patterns randomly scattered,... until I tried
grouping the precincts by borough. Each borough had distinctly
different behavior that was very readily visible and very consistent with my own
understanding of their familiar social
character.
One might also ask, did I bias my findings by possibly asking the questions in a way that determined the answer I got? People do indeed commonly find what they're looking for because of that. Well, I found something like I was looking for, but I tried to be careful about that. I did push people to recall what was going on inside the their culture, asking about events without names, signs of change easily forgotten. From my own experience of living on West 96th street at the time I thought the turnaround might have had something to do with those amazing memorial murals that the 'wild style' graffiti artists made on handball court walls all over town for the families and friends of the victims of the street. I never guessed that when I asked people about that specifically they would remember but not give it much importance. It was such a dramatic and short term art action phenomenon (nicely recorded in "R.I.P. Memorial Wall Art") occurring seemingly just at the moment of the break. Now I think it was just one of a great many 'mirrors' of what was happening that a great many caring people and organizations began holding up for the people of the 'hoods' to see themselves in. It's a new perception actually, coming about three years after my interviews, about what the common element in a number of the provocative comments. That a huge sudden change in our local culture of such enormous importance would go essentially unnoticed is still the most amazing thing. It really took work to get people to remember what happened at all!
10/18/10 12/1Then this year (Oct 2010) it occurred to me to do a study like I did for the emergence of the Sustainability discussion, and see if the number of articles in the NY Times year to year would show a connection between the the emergence of the Hip-Hop I was largely unaware of till the late 90's and graffiti wall art movement I had noticed in my neighborhood when living on West 96th street, exposed to the horror of the crack epidemic's peak by listening to frequent gunfire outside my bedroom window at night. What I found is summed up in the third graph below, that the explosive emergence of Hip-Hop within the scene, quite below nearly everyone's radar, does seem to exactly coincide with the sudden reversal in the direction of change experienced throughout the whole city. Just as Hip-Hop emerged as definable culture and art form in its initial explosion from 1988 to 91, the great crime culture that arose in the ghettos of the 1960's lost it's attraction, for lots of good reasons that never worked before. The whole city abruptly stopped resupplying it with new recruits, is what rapid decay curve in the data suggests. Consistent with what the people I interviewed were saying, all the previously ineffective ways of bringing the crime culture to an end suddenly started to work, and drained of vitality it simply faded away. Still, for a turn of events as dramatic as that, it's amazing that no one noticed.
It looks as if the whole society's desperation to find some escape from the Crack Culture that had enthralled the underemployed youth of New York's poor neighborhoods, filling the prisons and morgues with its victims, needed and found a spark of alternative ways of living from Hip-Hop, and energized Hip-Hop in the process. It seems like a good explanation for why the murder rate curve looks as if the culture suddenly just stopped giving any more of its young to the world of crack, and ALL the measures to fight it suddenly started to work. It's amazing, but in the many interviews I did not a single person mentioned it, that the kids found something new to do of their own invention.
A further irony, of course, is that the underground movement that gave birth to Hip-Hop seems to have been the community of graffiti artists who's main mission in life seemed to be to deface anything reachable in NYC with bold displays of their signature graphics, saying "me me me" as a 'rude' statement to the world... but an apparently profound claim to self-identity too. That, of course, was the 'misbehavior' the "broken windows" theory of policing often credited with the turn around was aimed at suppressing. It seems lucky it didn't.
Other figures available:
US murder rates since 1900 w/ NY & other States
Queens & S.I. Murder Rates enlarged w/ DR
NYC Precinct Murder Rates
Power Point of all the large data curves
See also the inside views of the NYC crimewave
cultures :
"Wild Cowboys" Jackall 1997 Harvard Univ. Press
"R.I.P. Memorial Wall Art" Cooper & Sciorra, Henry Hot and Co.