New York’s “Zero Tolerance” Success Story is a Farce

The Big Apple is more and more secure thanks to the “zero tolerance” of security forces. New York has been living on this fame for many years, with the image of a city that defeated criminality. It is a reputation useful to attract tourists who provide an important source of income for the city. Now doubt is arising about the legitimacy of reports claiming New York is secure. Some think these claims are the fruit of the systematic manipulation of statistics.

The scandal burst because of the reports of over a hundred retired cops. They were high officers of the New York Police Department (NYPD), with grades of captain and above, and all of them revealed undergoing pressures to alter the compilation of data about crimes committed in the city. The pressures came from above: very often from the cabinet of the mayor, both with the administration of Rudolph Giuliani and with the current mayor, Michael Bloomberg. These mayors would both boast of the decrease of criminality as a result of their efforts, the main success of their policies of “law and order.” If this legend falls apart, the implications go way beyond Manhattan. The myth of a New York free from criminals has had a powerful effect on all the United States and even on the rest of the world.

Many other American city leaders, along with some mayors of the Lega party in Northeast Italy, have tried to imitate the “Giuliani Doctrine,” which was copied by Bloomberg. It has two strengths. The zero tolerance policy, which consists of administering severe punishments for even the lightest crimes, imposes a sense of legality all over the urban territory. The second positive feature is the famous “broken windows” rule: if a gang of young criminals have fun breaking windows in the suburbs, the broken glass has to be replaced right away, since maintenance shows citizens the government’s control of the territory. These are interesting precepts, which probably have given some results.

New York citizens (and not just those of Manhattan, but also Brooklyn, Queens and even the Bronx) truly have the feeling of living in a city that is more secure now than thirty years ago. Homicides have decreased — no doubt about it, but how much of this perception is also the result of an illusion, cleverly generated by augmented statistics?

A program called CompStat is under attack: a system of data compilation for crime reports, initiated by Mayor Giuliani. With the crimes divided in seven big categories, the data elaborated by CompStat would then be given to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which completes, among its other duties, the task of elaborating criminal statistics trends in the United States. Compared to other cities, New York has been shining in these reports since the times of Giuliani.

However, over one hundred retired senior officers who chose to reveal the truth are telling a very different story. The methods used to portray a better reality were clever. When police would quickly respond to a citizen’s call, the officers very often received instructions to convince the victim not to report the incident or guide the victim to downgrade the crime to a less serious category.

The funniest practice was a system used in police stations to decrease the numbers of thefts and robberies. Some officers would go to Ebay — the biggest online market of used products — to look for the same stolen items in New York, but for a cheaper price than the value reported by the victims of the thefts. The value of the stolen goods was lowered using the cheapest offers on Ebay.

That the statistics about criminality in New York were suspicious has been in the air for a while. The police labor unions, for example, have been raising doubts about the continuous decrease of criminality boasted in official reports for a while. Evidently, the frequency of calls for police cars and the workload for the cops do not seem to confirm the myth of a New York free from criminals.

Until now, the critical voices had gone unheard for the most part. In the meantime the myth of the Giuliani method had led many American cities to adopt the entire CompStat system patented by the City of New York. Yesterday the revelations of one hundred police officers were on the cover of “The New York Times.”

The judiciary investigations and political problems will come soon. While we wait for the whole truth, we recommend that all the mayors of the world who believed that they could make miracles with the “zero tolerance” policy proceed cautiously. The practice of punishing all crimes severely should work anywhere, but using smoke and mirrors to make your statistics look better than they are is just foolish.