Law prof's book probes 'whys' behind Big Apple crime decline
While the jaw-dropping decline in New York City’s crime rate is welcome news, it comes with a surprising corollary. “Most of the prevailing assumptions that have long driven U.S. crime and drug policy appear to be untrue,” said Berkeley Law professor and renowned criminologist, Franklin Zimring.
In his new book, The City That Became Safe, Zimring conducts a probing investigation of New York’s more than 80-percent drop in crime from 1990 to 2009. His findings—that police strategy played a key role in crime reduction, and that crime plummeted even as prison populations decreased—overturn decades of conventional wisdom.
