I was wrong about that. Violent crime had abated in urban America by the late ’90s — and residents rather quickly started to feel comfortable there. Central-city populations increased, affluent young people were attracted to living near the urban centers, and cities began a comeback that stalled only with the onset of COVID-19 a quarter-century later.
As I write this, we are witnessing a decline in violent crime approaching the one that occurred in the 1990s. If the lessons of that decade are a reliable guide, public confidence in urban safety should be bouncing back again. This time, though, it isn’t happening.
The numbers themselves, especially the latest ones, are pretty striking. According to the FBI, the number of murders in the United States fell in 2023 by the steepest rate ever recorded. That pattern persisted in 2024. As of October, homicides were down about 16 percent nationwide, just compared with the previous year.
Not all cities enjoyed the same relief, but most did. Detroit was on track in 2023 to record its lowest homicide rates in 57 years. Washington, D.C., which had a disturbingly high rate of violent crime in 2023, saw it drop precipitately in 2024. Killings in the district fell from 273 to 190 during the same period. After a spike in violence that coincided with the worst period of COVID-19, the numbers in many places were lower than they were before the pandemic came along.
The streets may have grown significantly safer in a remarkably short time, but so far at least the public doesn’t seem to be buying it. A 2024 Gallup poll found that 25 percent of respondents identified crime as an extremely serious problem, one of the highest rates of concern in a long time. In another survey, two-thirds of respondents said they believed crime was increasing.
Is it too soon to expect another return of confidence? Or is something else at work here? That’s not an easy question to answer. One way to look at it is to examine a variety of offenses, not just homicide.
For most types of crimes, the numbers are getting better. In D.C., which keeps generally reliable data, not only is murder on the decline, but robbery, car theft and assault occurred significantly less often in 2024 than they did in 2023. Robbery was down a remarkable 39 percent, motor vehicle theft declined by 25 percent and assault with a dangerous weapon was down 27 percent.
ALL OF THAT LED ME TO CHECK ON SOME LESSER OFFENSES. In particular, I looked at shoplifting, which has been getting worse while the rates for more serious crimes have been getting better. The National Retail Federation reports that there was 93 percent more shoplifting in this country in 2023 than there had been in 2019.
This was the direction in almost every big city surveyed. In four years, shoplifting increased 64 percent in New York City and 61 percent in Los Angeles. It now reportedly represents about 20 percent of all the larcenies committed in America. Even more strikingly, 91 percent of retailers told the NRF that shoplifters were more aggressive in 2023 than they had been in 2019. And things appeared to be getting worse in 2024: In Chicago, the number of offenses was actually down a bit in 2023 from its prevalence in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, but then rose dramatically during the first nine months of last year.
Moreover, the nature of the offense seems to be evolving, from unorganized one-person goods-snatching to coordinated multiperson operations. “The theft is no longer the shoplifting that we may have been accustomed to, or many consider shoplifting to be, which is stealing a few items for personal use or need,” explained David Johnston of the Retail Federation.
Why am I dwelling this much on a misdeed that, after all, doesn’t kill anybody and causes relatively little serious injury? The reason is that it is an increasingly common, and commonly noticed, emblem of civic disorder. “When violent, brazen ‘smash and grab’ incidents occur and capture headlines,” says Ernesto Lopez of the Council on Criminal Justice, “it influences public perceptions and suggests that such incidents are common.”
When you take the rising number of conspicuous retail thefts, and add in the rare but heavily publicized random incidents of violence on subways and in other public places, you have a potent recipe for widespread public concern. As Adam Gelb, the Council on Criminal Justice president, puts it, “The numbers [of overall serious crime] are falling back to earth, but a combination of high-profile national incidents and street-level disorder are keeping people on edge.”
RANDOMNESS MATTERS A GREAT DEAL. Most violent offenses are committed by perpetrators who are related to the victims or at least are personally acquainted with them. When newspapers or websites report that a homicide has occurred, they are often quick to assure readers that it was not a random event, not something that is likely to happen to them or anyone they know. Moreover, the majority of violent crimes in any urban area are committed within a relatively narrow band of impoverished and distressed parts of the city, and are often gang-related. As troubling as these are, they rarely cause more than a passing concern to the residents of middle-class territory, minorities as well as whites.
But when a woman is burned to death on a subway car, as happened last month in New York City, or someone is pushed off a train platform by a stranger, it is infinitely more frightening to ordinary city residents. The number of these bizarre crimes is extremely low — it is more dangerous to drive on almost any urban interstate highway than to ride on public transportation — but random crimes are nearly always front-page news and result in widespread public angst.
The combination of increasingly common minor retail crimes and unusual but frightening random events has serious public consequences. Some of those consequences are political. It would be ridiculous to link either political party to the encouragement of shoplifting, but it’s indisputably true that in 2024 voters around the country saw Democrats as soft on quality-of-life offenses, and expressed those attitudes at the polls.
In California, a 2014 law enacted by Democratic legislators and approved by the state’s voters reclassified shoplifting, grand theft and receiving stolen property as misdemeanors if the dollar value was below $950. Most of that law was repealed last year. In 2020, the Democratic-controlled Oregon legislature made possessing illicit drugs such as heroin punishable by a ticket and a maximum $100 fine. That law was also repealed in 2024. These laws were in addition to a reduction in law enforcement presence and vigilance and the politically disastrous slogan of “defund the police” promoted by a small but vocal element of urban progressives.
THIS ALL LEADS ME BACK to the issue of “broken windows” policing, the law enforcement strategy that cracks down on minor offenses in the belief that they are gateways to more serious crime. Broken windows policing was introduced in New York City in the 1990s, and it coincided with, if it did not directly cause, New York’s dramatic crime rate decline that persisted over two decades. Similar strategies were soon in place all over urban America.
Broken windows has fallen out of favor in much of the country in recent years, beset by arguments that it discriminated against the poor and minorities. A 2015 study concluded that "aggressive order maintenance strategies that target individual disorderly behaviors do not generate significant crime reductions." A study by sociologists Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush found that social disorder and crime are not connected as part of a causal chain. And a U.S. Justice Department report in 2016 concluded that broken windows had led the Baltimore Police Department to discriminate against and alienate minority groups.
But in view of recent events, it may be that broken windows is due for at least a partial comeback. This would not excuse the excesses that the strategy led to in a number of cities. But it would recognize the fundamental reality that there is a connection of some kind between quality-of-life offenses and more serious violent crimes.
The American public understands this, no matter what academics may say. The political party that ignores it is asking for trouble. The party that grasps it is clearing away an obstacle thwarting an urban resurgence.
