On Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a set of new initiatives in response to a recent rise in violent crime, at least in certain parts of New York City. According to a written statement from the Mayor’s office, “Since the beginning of 2014, even as crime has dropped citywide, shootings in public housing developments have gone up by 31 percent.” The city will allocate just over two hundred and ten million dollars, directed at the city’s public-housing developments, mainly in sections of Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx. The money will be used to fight crime, but also to increase education and employment opportunities for residents, and to revitalize the physical appearance of the developments. After a decadeslong decline in crime, a realization has emerged that much of what remains is localized to the city’s housing projects. De Blasio’s initiatives cannot be separated from America’s long history of inequality and discrimination—least of all in the Mayor’s own conception of the problem. “We are making investments in our public housing—investments that should’ve been made long ago, but we’re making them now,” he said outside of the Wagner Houses, in East Harlem.

Recently, I talked with Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at Columbia Law School, who has studied crime in New York for decades and whose data and testimony were used in last year’s trial over the city’s stop-and-frisk practices. In our conversation, I tried to get a sense of why understanding crime can be such a difficult endeavor.

Fagan made a distinction between using surveillance—in an epidemiological sense, using only a panoramic view—to combat crime and gathering intelligence about who the criminals are. He noted, in our discussion, that understanding crime requires understanding people. But there is a risk in seeing this directive as a detached route to safer streets. Education, full employment, and quality living conditions are worthy goals unto themselves. Will two hundred million dollars be enough?

Our exchange is below, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and the N.Y.P.D. believe that the recent rise in shootings is a result of what they’re calling “crew” and gang activity, localized in certain sections of the city. How plausible is that?

I think it’s reasonable. Nobody really knows; the intel here is very, very poor. There’s a lot of surveillance. One of the things that the former commissioner Raymond Kelly did—and I’m happy to give Kelly credit for this—is that the N.Y.P.D. developed this program, Operation Crew Cut, which took effect somewhere around the middle of 2012. They really did switch tactics when they sharply cut back on stop-and-frisk, and reoriented toward focusing on the places where the homicides and shootings were taking place, which were really in and around the city’s housing developments. They actually began to have even more success, and, in the face of a steady decline in stops, they were able to drive the murder rate down while the shooting rate stayed flat. And a lot of that was focussed on the same crews that, according to Bratton, are causing trouble today. So I do think that there is something smart about focussing there. Whether there is something new and different going on in that scene in the housing projects and in the neighborhoods surrounding them, compared to what it was a year ago, I can’t say. I don’t know that anybody can say that with any certainty.

Why is there so much uncertainty?

A lot of what the N.Y.P.D. does, and what many of the other police departments around the country do, is based on epidemiological surveillance. They would look and see where the crimes were. To some degree, they had some sense around who the bad actors were, but that wasn’t really the case; that wasn’t what they did. What they did was focus more on an epidemiological model, where they sent the police and had them be very active in places where they felt that the crime rates were the highest. That didn’t require a whole lot of knowledge about those places or the dynamics of crime in those places. It was just simply putting bodies in place and being active in those places in a form of deterrence. But that tactic didn’t necessarily mean getting intelligence about who the bad actors were, who the most volatile parties were, when those parties were likely to engage in serious violence, either retaliatory or in some other form.

Then, when they switched to Crew Cut, they really did try to get a little intel. They were trying to penetrate particular social networks. And one thing we understand about violence, particularly violence among young people, is that it’s very heavily networked, that the people who are shooting each other know each other—either directly or they know each other one-off, with one or two degrees of separation—and a lot of this is conflict over territory. It’s an old story: territory, personal slights, and so on. And, I think, one of the things that they tried to do under Crew Cut is try and penetrate those networks. So they got a little bit more intel that way. The numbers suggest that they were kind of effective with that.

But, for now, for whatever reason, the intel that they had before that was helping to curtail shootings and murders seems to not be working. Whether the groups, the crews, have reconfigured, whether the crews have adapted, whether there’s an age effect—kids aging from young adolescence into the age when they get really active in these areas—it’s just really hard to tell what’s going on.

There were over sixteen hundred shootings in 2011 and almost eleven hundred in 2013. What do you think is a sensible goal? How few shootings per year can a city like New York get to?

Nobody knows. I mean, it really is a function of the supply of guns and the ease of access to guns. There’s always going to be a market for guns. And to the extent that there are markets for them, then people will pick them up and, unfortunately, they use them. It could very well be that the market—the gun market—has expanded. It’s entirely possible that there’s been some shift in the gun market.

One thing we learned in doing street research in the late nineteen-nineties, when shootings were really high, was that the presence of a gun will lead to a dispute because people will change the way that they think about disputes. It’s a lot easier for me to get into a dispute if I have a gun because I know I can win. And, to some extent, one might argue, if that’s the case—if guns themselves can instigate violence and can escalate conflict to lethal or near-lethal levels—then one might argue that an increase in shootings is just simply a function of the increase in the availability of guns. You can’t rule that out.

Is there a correlation between this recent rise in shootings and the decline of stop-and-frisk?

If you look at the stop counts starting, say, the second quarter of 2012, they went down steadily. They went down dramatically in 2012 and even more dramatically in 2013. And, during that period of decline, starting, say, in April of 2012 and right through the end of 2013, as stops continued to go way, way down, the shootings were flat. And so you’ve got a good almost eighteen-month period of steady decline in the number of stops. And then all of a sudden shootings go up. So either somebody put out a memo and said, “Gee, you know, things have changed here out on the streets. We can all start carrying our guns.” Or there’s something else going on. The numbers just don’t add up.

So how do you see the over-all decline of crime in New York? How does it fit in with national trends?

Well, I think the rest of the country is catching up to New York in terms of crime decline. The Times did a series on this some time ago. It showed that in San Diego, many of the large Texas cities, and elsewhere around the country, the crime declines were actually pretty dramatic in many of these places. New York had its big crime decline through the nineteen-nineties. The rate of decline kind of levelled off through the first seven or eight years of the last decade. And crime is inching down now at a much slower pace than it did, say, twenty years ago. So I think we’re reaching, maybe, an equipoise in crime.

But, you know, it’s a big city. And we’re safe, and other cities have caught up, which suggests that it’s very large, maybe even secular, forces that are at play here that, again, nobody really understands.

How do the histories of racism and inequality factor into the challenges that the city faces?

It’s safe to say that you’ve got a large share of New York’s population living in conditions of hypersegregation, and, by definition, given their eligibility for public housing, they are living in conditions of pretty strong social deprivation. They’re socially and economically and physically isolated from much of the mainstream of New York City. Criminologists understand that there’s a pretty strong correlation between the conditions in a particular neighborhood—the social and economic conditions in a neighborhood—and the crime rates in those neighborhoods. I think what they don’t understand are the moving parts of that relationship. It’s probably not an accident that the places that continue to have the slowest crime declines, and the places that are still having violence problems today, are places that are at those extremes—extremes of segregation, extremes of poverty, extremes of physical, social, and economic isolation, and the extremes of having no political power.

Public housing projects exist socially, economically, and physically at the extremes of all of the conditions that we know are correlated with crime. Policy prescriptions for breaking up concentrated poverty and inequality are things that are big topics, and they’re on the table today. But, to the extent that NYCHA [the New York City Housing Authority] itself can improve the lives of the people who live there, it increases their stakes in those places, and they probably would be more willing to exert social control and work together, collectively, to create some kind of sense of security.

Photograph by Karsten Moran/The New York Times/Redux.


Matthew McKnight is a Web producer at newyorker.com.

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