Local Activists
Patrick Sharkey is convinced that he has discovered this factor. The New York University sociologist is the science director of the Crime Lab, which advises the city’s police, judicial and youth services. The result of his study from January 2018: Citizens’ initiatives that began to recapture public space in the 1990s played a decisive role in the Great Crime Decline (see column 8 in the margin).
Such organizations were often discussed in newspaper articles and field reports. The journalist Robert W. Snyder, for example, describes in a book their work in the Manhattan borough of Washington Heights. The murder rate had soared there in the 1980s, too, and fear and mistrust reigned in the entire neighborhood. In July 1989, the lifeguard asked a swimmer in a public outdoor pool to leave a restricted area of the pool. The swimmer got out of the water, went to his pocket, came back with a pistol, and fired. The lifeguard was seriously injured and a 13-year-old girl died.
But then citizens came together in the “Alianza Dominicana” and organized protest marches. The “Mothers against Violence” association set itself the task of driving drug addicts from playgrounds, the “Friends of Fort Tryon Park” monitored the green space and organized events for the neighborhood to make it clear who the park belongs to (see column in the margin 9.).
Patrick Sharkey found that the Great Crime Decline had been uneven. Crime rates had fallen most dramatically in what were once the most dangerous areas, in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty that had long been left to their own devices. The question was: what has led to the transformation of these neighborhoods since the 1990s?
After a whole series of analyzes, the sociologist admits the massively increased police presence, video surveillance and imprisonment to be a not insignificant part of the change. The more rigorous prosecution had primarily prevented the public trade in crack, which had triggered numerous deadly shootings in the 1980s.
But the influence of the citizens’ initiatives turned out to be at least as important. In New York, where around 25 new initiatives per 100,000 residents emerged in the 1990s, local organizations were responsible for a drop in the murder rate of almost 25 percent (see column 10 in the margin).
For the transformation of the former no-go areas into quite safe and popular residential areas, it took great efforts from the inside out, people who take responsibility for the community, work with neglected young people, care for children and the elderly Denouncing violence, exemplifying values.
Sharkey also investigated what was happening in the neighborhoods as they gradually became safer. The dominant pattern, he says, was the change from a very poor, predominantly African-American population to an ethnically and socially diverse population – with the result that the crime rate continued to fall.
Does that mean that the increased security in the former problem areas is due to the displacement of poor people? “No,” says Sharkey, “while gentrification is a problem in some places, it is much more common to observe that neighborhoods that have become safer attract people with higher incomes without the poor moving away.”
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