Thank You, NYPD
Heather MacDonald has a great piece in the City Journal about the NYPD's crime fighting strategies since the Giuliani administration. Aside from its love letter to Ray Kelly aspect, it's a telling article on how the NYPD brought down crime well beyond national averages. a quote:

New York City has shattered criminology’s central myth, but criminologists remain in denial. Policing, they still insist, can do little to lower crime. Economic inequality, demographic trends, changing drug-use patterns—these determine crime levels, they say, not police tactics. Nevertheless, since 1994, New York City has enjoyed a crime drop unmatched in the rest of the country—indeed, unparalleled in history—and only Gotham’s revolutionary style of policing can explain it. Yet rather than flooding the city to study this paradigm-breaking phenomenon, most criminologists are busy looking the other way.

She's right. There are still many academics that hold to this view. My personal opinion is that there is a certain frictional level of crime (like frictional unemployment) below which you cannot go. I think we're about at that level. In addition, demographics are important--ignoring them is a recipe for disaster.
- posted by Base10 @ 10:32 AM