Violent crime declined dramatically in NYC under Mayor David Dinkins' community policing policy called Safe Streets, Safe Cities. We need better police policies, ones like this that have been proven to work.
In light of Hillary Clinton's speech today, introduced by former Mayor David Dinkins, I expanded a comment I posted yesterday with statistics and links about the success of community policing in reducing violent crime in NYC and the real Dinkins crime record. People need some facts about the real record of community policing and resources to use in this very important discussion of violent crime, police behavior and relations with the communities they serve, over-militarization, abuse, bias, etc.
David Dinkins, Safe Streets, Safe Cities and declining crime statistics
You may not know about the real Dinkins record and declining crime stats because of poor reporting by NYC news media and muscular "myth-making" by the Bloomberg campaign machine and his surrogate, Rudy Guiliani, who was seeking to burnish (and falsify) his record on crime, and muddy David Dinkins'.
The myth that crime had gone up under Dinkins and only a mayor Bloomberg -- validated by pro-law & order, tough guy Guiliani -- could "save" NYC from out of control, violent urban youth who were emboldened by the Dinkins Administration, was amplified by unlimited cash and the right wing noise machine: Fox news, Rush Limbaugh et al on talk radio, the NY Post, etc. Responsible news outlets did little to correct the record and the public fell for the myth.
How about some facts?
Wikipedia David Dinkins
Under Dinkins' Safe Streets, Safe Cities program, crime in New York City decreased more dramatically and more rapidly, both in terms of actual numbers and percentage, than at any time in modern New York City history.[16] The rates of most crimes, including all categories of violent crime, made consecutive declines during the last 36 months of his four-year term, ending a 30-year upward spiral and initiating a trend of falling rates that continued beyond his term.[3]
(my bold)
[3] This is a PDF of a Justice Department report. Includes a dramatic graph of the decline in crime that I can't grab for you, drat.
The Remarkable Drop in Crime in New York City
Patrick A. Langan, Ph.D.
Matthew R. Durose
Statisticians
Bureau of Justice Statistics
U. S. Department of Justice
October 21, 2004
Here's a 2009 NYTimes story (finally) looking back at the successes of the Dinkins Administration
Mr. Dinkins’s most lasting achievement might have been in the very area where he now fares worst in popular memory. (crime) He obtained the State Legislature’s permission to dedicate a tax to hire thousands of police officers, and he fought to preserve a portion of that anticrime money to keep schools open into the evening, an award-winning initiative that kept tens of thousands of teenagers off the street. Later he hired Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, and in the mayor’s final years in office, homicide began its now record-breaking decline.
(my bold)
And an excellent Gothamist article by Giuliani biographer Wayne Barrett, well worth a re-read
In the final days of the administration of David Dinkins, we had 36 consecutive months of decline in the crime statistics across the board, in the seven index crimes. Murder went down 14 percent. Those last 36 months under Dinkins reversed trends that were a decade old. Who should get the credit, the mayor who reversed the trend or the mayor who deepened the trend?
Obviously, we know who's gotten the credit. The New York Times has done, by my latest count, twelve front-page articles about the decline in the crime rate under Rudy Giuliani. It did one article about the decline in the crime rate under David Dinkins -- and in that 55-paragraph story, it never mentioned the name of David Dinkins. What Rudy Giuliani has managed to do is mug the media into accepting as fact that he is the man who caused it to happen.
and
... did you know that in the final three years of the Dinkins administration, gun arrests averaged 7,300? They have averaged 4,000 under Giuliani. The strategy of cracking down on guns was a Ray Kelly/David Dinkins initiative. By the time Rudy Giuliani took office, gun arrests, if they had any impact on the murder rate, were already having it.
The only real claim that Rudy Giuliani can make to a legacy at all is in the crime statistics, and they have been miserably manipulated
(my bold)