So I chatted with my driver. I answered his questions about the conference I was going to, and he told me about the one-car taxi company he’d started himself after coming to America from the Dominican Republic. He asked how old I was. “Twenty-five?” he repeated, like a hundred other well-meaning cashiers and bartenders before him; being small and round-faced, I get this all the time. “I thought you were 14, 16, tops.” He told me he had a daughter back home, for whom he worked long hours, especially now — this was June 2008 — when gas prices were so high.

Then he glanced at me in the rearview mirror and said, “You’re very beautiful.”

Like any other young woman, I’ve been the object of plenty of unsolicited flattery from strangers. Dubious compliments trail me when I walk busy sidewalks, or burst from car windows when I’m riding my bike: Girl, I wish I was that bicycle! I know I’m supposed to ignore them entirely, but with half an hour left in this guy’s company, I didn’t want to be rude. My driver was in his 50s, with the gruff face and soft body of a person who spends his days in the car. I wanted to think of him as my friend.

“Thank you,” I said.

“What’s your name?”

I admonished myself for the flicker of hesitation I felt in telling him: “Helen.”

“Helen,” he repeated. “Beautiful.”

We got on the highway.

“Helen, are you married?”

“No.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

I cringed. I knew I should lie, but I couldn’t; to say yes would be a mockery of the longing I still felt for a boyfriend I’d broken up with almost a year earlier. “No.”

“Why not?” he asked.

In the backseat, I considered the question. Maybe this stranger and I would have a conversation on the subject. I could tell him my story of breaking up with someone I still loved, and he could advise me from the perspective of an older, more experienced man. In a few months, when my romantic life was restored, I imagined, I’d be able to say I had figured it all out with the help of my taxi driver.

“Do you like men?” he added helpfully.

It was an almost-too-perfect out. But in appreciation of his progressiveness, I decided to answer honestly one more time. “Yes.”

Then he said something I didn’t expect: “I love you.”

I’d waited entire relationships for those words, but hearing them now from this man only reminded me of how rarely I’d heard them in earnest. Once, in college, I’d given my number to a guy who followed me on a bike for several blocks of my afternoon jog. You don’t need to be running, you look good already. I did it mostly so he’d stop watching me, but I decided not to give him a fake number — it didn’t seem right. How did I know he wouldn’t be interesting to talk to? And so, for a week, he called every evening. He asked about my day, and I asked about his. He didn’t have a job. According to him, he spent his time watching TV, smoking weed and talking about me. When was I coming over? His brothers all wanted to meet his girlfriend, he said, and I was halfway through asking how many brothers he had when I realized that his brothers were his friends, kind of like how his girlfriend was me. When, at the end of the week, I told him I didn’t think the relationship was going to work out, it was exactly like breakups I’d experienced before: He begged to know my reasons, promised to change, and uttered those three magic words, whose implausibility served only to confirm my decision.

“I love you, Helen,” the driver repeated. He glanced at me again in the rearview mirror, then, when I didn’t respond, turned and beseeched me over his shoulder: “I love you! I love you, Helen. I love you.”

His expression was teasing but hopeful, as if he truly expected me to answer, I love you too. So I said, in what I hoped was a conversation-ending, please-watch-the-road tone, “Thanks.”

He laughed. “Take a break with me.”

“What?”

“Take a break with me. Let’s take a break together.”

That was all it took for my imagination to offer up a feast of clichéd nightmare scenarios. “Sorry, I’m already late,” I mumbled, while scolding myself, in a voice like my ex-boyfriend’s, to relax, he was just a friendly old guy. But in a fictional highway-side forest somewhere, my mouth was already taped up, my hands bound with rope, this man’s belt already unbuckled.

“Just half an hour,” he said. “Come on. Let’s take a break.”

“I can’t.”

“I love you, Helen. Please.”

“No,” I said. It didn’t want to sound too defensive, but the word came out almost as if I actually regretted it.

“What’s half an hour? Ten minutes. Let’s take a break for just 10 minutes.”

Again he turned to look at me, and I turned to look out the window, at the banks of trees, the movie theaters and the malls. Did he have some hidden spot where he took young women all the time? I tried not to imagine him opening the taxi’s spare tire compartment to reveal weapons, or worse. Maybe, when he pulled off the highway, I could open the door and run. If I scooted from the middle seat to the window now, I wondered, would he recognize the action as preparation for escape? Would he feel provoked?

“I love you. Please.”

“Sorry.”

“Just 10 minutes.”

Would I struggle? Would I scream? Kick him in the groin? Dial 911? Or would he simply buy me a coffee, caress my face, and tell me how much he loved me?

“Let me be nice to you.”

“No, thanks.” Trying to be discreet, I eased toward the backseat door and rested my fingers on the handle. My grip was shaky, and I couldn’t help recalling scenes from “Eye for an Eye,” the 1996 movie in which a delivery man rapes and kills a teenage girl, vividly seared into my memory since seeing it in a theater at 13. I wondered, for the first time, how that movie had affected my perception of men in the service industry. Maybe this taxi driver really did just want to buy me a coffee. Let’s take a break together, Helen. Please.

It’s strange — the first few times I told friends about this, I actually stopped here, lopping off what happened next entirely. Ugh, I would say, I had this creepy taxi experience. But that’s not the whole story; I’ve just never really understood the rest.

It felt like a miracle when the taxi exited in Middletown. Going slowly, pleading with me all the way, my driver steered us toward the building where I was supposed to check in. The gearshift went into park; the trunk got popped. I opened the door and stood, my heart pounding with relief. Finally, I was safe.

Outside, my driver handed me a business card. “This is my cellphone number,” he told me. “If you have free time this week, call.”

“OK,” I lied, grateful for the chance to part on friendly terms.

“Whenever you want,” he added. “It’s far, but I’ll come get you. At night, in the morning, we’ll take a break.”

I put the card in my pocket and pulled out my wallet. “How much do I owe you?”

“Helen …” he said mournfully, shaking his head. He leaned against the trunk of the car and crossed his arms.

“How much?”

With a frown and a little jut of his chin, he said, “You know what I want.”

The only thing that came to mind was no: “No.” Suddenly I was angry. “I don’t know.”

“You know what I really want.” Arms still crossed, he made sloppy kissing noises in my direction. Kiss, kiss, kiss. His lips were pink and gray from smoking; that morning he hadn’t shaved.

“What?” I asked.

“You know.” Again his lips smacked against each other.

And then I took a step forward, slung an arm around his shoulders … and kissed him.

Even in the moment, I felt shocked; I had no idea why it was happening. I still don’t know. Maybe I did it out of relief; maybe out of pity or sympathy; maybe because, at last, I had the chance to take control of the day’s misadventure.

It didn’t go on for very long. My lips stayed closed — I pressed them firmly together when I felt the wetter parts of his mouth roaming mine. His hands were on my hips, pulling me toward him. My arms stayed around him in a hug. Soon he’d be driving off, maybe laughing at the stupid girl he’d persuaded to kiss him, maybe fantasizing about our upcoming rendezvous, who knew? In the backseat of his cab, I’d been hung up on the question of what he wanted, but maybe the real question was what I wanted: to be paid attention to or ignored, to be desired or just left alone.

When our kiss was over, he grinned at me. “Helen, Helen, Helen,” he murmured. I extricated myself and handed him some cash as he implored me, one last time, to call. But I was already on my way inside, already hurrying to a bathroom stall where I locked myself in privacy, half-laughing, and trembling with some mix of horror and glee.

“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have,” Mayor Bloomberg said.

I’m not entirely sure what he means by having his own “State Department.” The city’s independent nonprofit tourism agency, maybe? But he didn’t mention that his army also comes with its own international (and questionably legal) intelligence-gathering apparatus, just like the CIA and FBI, except without any sort of oversight, congressional or otherwise.

Bloomberg, of course, is being a touch ironic, but he’s also not wrong. The NYPD has a 1,000-man army within its increasingly militarized ranks. It has tanks, combat rifles, anti-aircraft weaponry, non-lethal anti-terror sound cannons, and, supposedly, a submarine. And it’s all under the command of one guy, Ray Kelly, who answers solely to one other guy: Mike Bloomberg.

Bloomberg’s conception of the NYPD as “his army” explains a lot. Like why he thought it’d be OK to deploy them to Bermuda to help police his weekend home. (That plan was scuttled … once it leaked to the press.) Or why he thought it appropriate to use the NYPD to prevent demonstrators from … drumming on his block, one night.

If you want a sense of precisely how distanced from accountability NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly is, his response to being interrupted by a protester while addressing a Columbia class is illuminating. Faced with footage of police brutality, Kelly grinned and joked around.

A few minutes later, another student asked Kelly why most people who are arrested are incarcerated for “drug crimes.” Dinkins said he didn’t understand the question, and things got confrontational between the student, Kelly, and Dinkins pretty quickly. The student’s SIPA colleagues were not pleased—a few students and a TA asked if she was registered for the class. “No,” she said, “but I do have a question.”

Commissioner Kelly, still grinning, leaned over to another guest for today’s class, New York District Attorney Cy Vance, and loudly whispered, “Says something about the security of this school, doesn’t it?”

(Yes, that’s former Mayor David Dinkins, who himself once faced a revolt of entitled police officers chafing at the prospect of being held accountable for law-breaking and corruption.)

In case Kelly is unfamiliar with the easily available data regarding what his massive army actually does most days, the NYPD makes more arrests for possession of marijuana than for any other crime. Marijuana possession is used as a pretext to sweep up and arrest tens of thousands of black men every year. And the commissioner pretends he’s totally unaware of that fact, even as his department defends the practice as necessary for our safety.

Powerful (and popular) commissioner Kelly has basically escaped every NYPD scandal with his reputation unsullied. Mayor Bloomberg is generally treated by most of the local press as though the fact that he surely means well excuses all manner of illegal activities, lax oversight, and contempt for civil liberties and the law.

Harry Siegel, in a good recent piece on how the recent scandals of the NYPD are actually generating some negative ink for once, actually undersells the recent revelations:

The overly-aggressive response to the Wall Street “occupation”—which began with arresting dozens on the Brooklyn Bridge, proceeded to involve the pepper spraying of protesters, and concluded with a forced media blackout and the arrest of several reporters during the final, middle-of-the-night militarized “clean up” and Thursday’s “day of action”—may yet tip the scales toward a more normalized relationship between the city and the NYPD. It is the culmination of a scandal-ridden year. A partial list of the past year’s troubles includes the trial of two cops accused of rape; a leak-hindered internal affairs investigation into a ticket fixing conspiracy that some rank-and-file officers responded to by spitting on lawyers in the courthouse; a belated outcry over the frequently intrusive stop-and-frisk policy focused on poor and minority neighborhoods; revelations of the department’s secret intelligence program to collect information on Muslims; and the rough arrest of a black City Council member at a parade.

This leaves out, to name one major recent scandal, the 14-year NYPD veteran recently found guilty of planting drugs on an innocent subject. (It also leaves out a third cop credibly accused of rape.) (And the eight officers recently charged with smuggling guns — and cigarettes! — into the city.)

At the crooked narcotics detective’s trial, a retired cop claimed the practice of planting drugs to inflate arrest numbers was widespread, yet another unintended consequence of our data-driven mayor’s insistence on an NYPD that measures success by the number of people — predominantly young black people — subjected to the criminal justice system. The mayor has, in the past, dismissed serious criticisms of his “CompStat” system with ad hominem attacks on police unions.

In New York City, of course, each bad cop, or ring of bad cops, or unruly mob of bad cops is treated as an outlier. This is a press — especially the tabloid papers — that has long simply not cared that the NYPD routinely lies to journalists as a matter of departmental policy. It is widely known, for example, that arrest and ticket quotas exist, NYPD denials being approximately as worthless as a summons mistakenly issued to someone with Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association connections. Police statements on violent incidents are routinely contradicted by video evidence. Kelly feigns ignorance of his department’s methods of maximizing marijuana arrests.

But an army thinks differently than a simple civilian police force. They’re accountable only to their commanders, and not to the citizenry.

“He was in fact putting this bomb together,” Kelly said. “He was drilling holes and it would have been not appropriate for us to let him walk out the door with that bomb.”

Ten years after 9/11, New York remains a prime terrorism target. Bloomberg said at least 14 terrorist plots, including the latest alleged scheme, have targeted the city since the Sept. 11 attacks. No attack has been successful, however. Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad is serving a life sentence for trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010.

Kelly said Sunday that Pimentel was energized and motivated to carry out his plan by the Sept. 30 killing of al-Qaida’s U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

“He decided to build the bomb August of this year, but clearly he jacked up his speed after the elimination of al-Awlaki,” Kelly said.

An unemployed U.S. citizen originally from the Dominican Republic, Pimentel was “plotting to bomb police patrol cars and also postal facilities as well as targeted members of our armed services returning from abroad,” Bloomberg said.

New York police had him under surveillance for at least a year and were working with a confidential informant; no injury to anyone or damage to property is alleged, Kelly said. In addition, authorities have no evidence that Pimentel was working with anyone else, the mayor said.

“He appears to be a total lone wolf,” the mayor said. “He was not part of a larger conspiracy emanating from abroad.”

At Pimentel’s arraignment, his lawyer Joseph Zablocki said his client’s behavior leading up to the arrest was not that of a conspirator trying to conceal some violent scheme. Zablocki said Pimentel was public about his activities and was not trying to hide anything.

“I don’t believe that this case is nearly as strong as the people believe,” Zablocki said. “He (Pimentel) has this very public online profile. … This is not the way you go about committing a terrorist attack.”

Pimentel, also known as Muhammad Yusuf, was denied bail and remained in custody. The bearded, bespectacled man wore a black T-shirt and black drawstring pants and smiled at times during the proceeding. His mother and brother attended the arraignment, Zablocki said.

Pimentel is accused of having an explosive device Saturday when he was arrested, one he planned to use against others and property to terrorize the public. The charges accuse him of conspiracy going back at least to October 2010, and include first-degree criminal possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism, and soliciting support for a terrorist act.

Bloomberg said at the news conference that Pimentel represents the type of threat FBI Director Robert Mueller has warned about as U.S. forces erode the ability of terrorists to carry out large scale attacks.

“This is just another example of New York City because we are an iconic city … this is a city that people would want to take away our freedoms gravitate to and focus on,” Bloomberg said.

Kelly said a confidential informant had numerous conversations with Pimentel on Sept. 7 in which he expressed interest in building small bombs and targeting banks, government and police buildings.

Pimentel also posted on his website trueislam1.com and on blogs his support of al-Qaida and belief in jihad, and promoted an online magazine article that described in detail how to make a bomb, Kelly said.

Among his Internet postings, the commissioner said, was an article that states: “People have to understand that America and its allies are all legitimate targets in warfare.”

The New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division was involved in the arrest. Kelly said Pimentel spent most of his years in Manhattan and lived about five years in Schenectady. He said police in the Albany area tipped New York City police off to Pimentel’s activities.

Asked why federal authorities were not involved in the case, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said there was communication with them but his office felt that given the timeline “it was appropriate to proceed under state charges.”

About 1,000 of the city’s roughly 35,000 officers are assigned each day to counterterrorism operations. The NYPD also sends officers overseas to report on how other cities deal with terrorism. Through federal grants and city funding, the NYPD has spent millions of dollars on technology to outfit the department with the latest tools — from portable radiation detectors to the network of hundreds of cameras that can track suspicious activity.

Alexis Smith, 22, who lives in an apartment in the same building as Pimentel, said she was shocked that he was a suspect in a terrorist plot. “He was always very courteous to us,” she said, adding that Pimentel helped her carry groceries and luggage into the building.

“It’s nice to know he was only working alone,” she said.

___

Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz and Colleen Long and AP video journalist David R. Martin contributed to this report from New York. AP writer Samantha Gross also contributed to this report.

Today, in an astonishing twist, New York is one of the safest cities in the country. Its current homicide rate is 18 percent of its 1990 total — its auto theft rate is 6 percent. The drop exceeded the wildest dreams of crime experts of the 1990s, and it’s a testament to this transformation that New Yorkers now seem more likely to complain about the city’s dullness than about its criminality.

In his fascinating new book, “The City that Became Safe,” Franklin Zimring, a professor of law and chairman of the Criminal Justice Research Program at the University of California at Berkeley, looks at the real reasons behind that change — and his conclusions might surprise you. Contrary to popular belief, Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” bluster had little to do with it. Instead, it was a combination of strategic policing and harm reduction by the New York Police Department. Police targeted open-air drug markets, and went after guns, while leaving drug users largely alone. The implications of the strategy could make us revise not only the way we think about crime, but the way we think about our prison system and even human nature.

Salon spoke to Zimring over the phone about Giuliani’s crackdown, the unique nature of New York violent crime and what other cities can take away from this change.

How unexpected was New York’s decrease in crime over the last decade?

What happened in the United States during the 1990s was itself a major surprise. After essentially not being able to make any substantial progress in crime control over three decades, all of the sudden crime dropped over an eight-year period by something close to 40 percent. Now what happened in New York City was essentially twice as much of a crime decline, a four-fifths drop from its 1990 peak. That is to say more than 80 percent of the homicide, the burglary, the robbery that New York was experiencing in 1990, New York is no longer bedeviled by. And the decline lasted twice as long as the national crime decline.

How significant is that kind of crime drop?

It is absolutely unprecedented. That is to say, a city where there are no revolutionary changes in population, or institutions, or economy going from extremely high crime and violence to, by American standards, extremely low crime and modest-to-low interpersonal violence was something that we had never experienced before. That doesn’t mean that simply because it was unheard of people can’t very quickly take it for granted and forget that they ever had a problem.

I’m reminded of the Village Voice’s billboard campaign from a few years ago that celebrated the old crime-filled New York with slogans like “Where did all the junkies go?” It seemed a little perverse to me.

The low crime environment in New York is taken for granted and crime is no longer such an interesting issue in the city. It’s no longer a media issue. It turns out that crime is like a toothache. You only think about dentists when your teeth hurt and the municipal teeth are no longer hurting.

I’ve always been under the impression that New York got a lot wealthier during that time, but as you point out, that’s not the case. How did New York change during that period?

The big story in New York City is not just the huge change in crime, but the massive contrast between the very modest changes that happened in the city and the huge results. Yeah, there were 3- or 4,000 extra police by the end of the period, in a city of 8.3 million. That’s a pretty superficial change. There wasn’t a flood of new jobs, the schools didn’t get wonderful, economic equality is worse rather than better. The basic populations and processes of the city didn’t change, but those relatively minor changes had huge impact on crime.

So what does that tell us about the nature of crime?

We used to have what I call a supply-side theory of crime. That is the notion that once people get in the habit of committing crime, of robberies, and burglaries, and drug sales, they are either going to be locked up or they are going to persist in criminality. That supply side theory of persistent criminality just animated all of our assumptions about what worked in crime control and what didn’t. That notion of persistence meant that we were very, very pessimistic about the capacity of police to make a dent in crime for a very simple reason; because police are temporary and our notion was that criminal propensities were more or less permanent. You send three cops to 125thand 8thAvenue and the criminals just go to 140thStreet. Or you send a lot of cops on Tuesday, and the robbers strike on Thursday instead.

That was the assumption, and what we found out in essence was this: that if you send a lot of cops to 125thStreet on Tuesday, that’s not only one less robbery on Tuesday, but that’s one less robbery in 2011 and the reason for that is that the things which determine criminal propensities are a lot more situational and contingent than we thought. If you say there isn’t going to be a robbery on Tuesday, that’s one less robbery in New York City. That doesn’t mean that people are saving it up for the long term.

Which means, in turn, the tremendous growth in the prison system we’ve witnessed over the last few decades is terribly misguided.

The temporary solutions that police and policing can provide turn out to have permanent impact on crime. Sending people away for 28 years all of the sudden sounds inefficient because instead of being able to assume that they were going to be active criminals for all 28 years, that variability in criminal propensities means that our investment in locking them up provides much less assurance that we’re saving crime. Between 1990, which was the high point in New York City crime, and 2009 which is the end of the books measuring period, the percent of people released from prison who are reconvicted of a felony in three years, and I’m using that really as a measure of criminal activity, that percentage in 1990 was 28 percent. In 2006, which gives them three years on the street by 2009, the percentage of people reconvicted of a felony having been active criminals and been sent to prison and been released, drops from 28 percent to 10 percent. That means that the personal crime rate of former high-rate offenders has dropped 64 percent. In a way, that’s absolutely necessary if the general crime rate goes down by more than 80 percent, but what it says about our investment in prisons as long-term crime control, is all of the sudden the gains we got from locking people up, have also dropped 64 percent. So prison is a lot less cost-effective.

How does New York prisoner size compare to the rest of the country?

Over the period from 1990 to 2009, the rate of imprisonment in the United States, outside of New York City, went up by 65 percent. Even though there was a general crime decline, we kept throwing people in prison. In New York City, the rate of imprisonment and jailing didn’t go up at all, it went down 28 percent. So what you have is that the one American city that did best in the crime control sweepstakes of the 1990s and the 21stcentury actually had less use of incarceration than everyplace else. If this were an experiment, what happened is that the kids who didn’t brush with Crest had vastly fewer cavities. This is a country that had only one answer to its crime problems for 45 years. This is a country that increased the number of people it locked up by sixfold over the 40 years after 1970. So in essence what New York has done was demonstrate that the major investment we were making in controlling crime was simultaneously inefficient and unnecessary.

There’s an assumption that the New York crime decline was tied to Rudy Giuliani’s crackdown on small crimes — squeegee kid, and the homeless, and petty criminals. Is that true?

When you come back and you count your change carefully on these histories, you are always going to find a mixture of myth and reality. The chief tactition of the police changes in New York City, of the crime-control part, was a character named Jack Maple, now deceased, who wrote a book in the late 1990s that was an extremely honest and very forthright analysis of what the problems were and what they did with policing. The combination of reading carefully the historical record and then doing a massive historical research leads to a number of very, very clear conclusions. Clear conclusion No. 1 is this: that what went on never was order-maintenance or broken-windows [zero tolerance] policing.

The broken windows theory, which was a James Q. Wilson and George Kelling theory of tremendous impact in the early 1980s, was that the signals you send that essentially repress non-serious crime make people feel better. The police essentially ignore the worst neighborhoods in the city, the ones with the highest rates of violence, they go to the marginal ones, the places that are at risk of becoming serious problems but haven’t made it all the way to the center of the second circle of crime-control hell yet. Because what Wilson and Kelling said about the highest crime areas, is that they were probably hopeless. Well, that’s the opposite of what the New York City police did.

If you’re going to drive the homicide rate down by 82 percent, you have to go to the hot spots where homicide and robbery and burglary keep happening. And that was the focus of the New York City police. And not only were they interested in the highest crime areas, but what they were interested in, the people they wanted to take off the streets, were not the people who were committing less serious crimes, they wanted to take the robbers and the burglars and the shooters off the streets. The way in which they did that is that they took suspicious persons and they instrumentally arrested them for small crimes.

“Suspicious persons” is a loaded term …

Marijuana was not a priority of the New York City police, but they had a huge number of public marijuana arrests. Why was that? That was because they were only arresting minority males who looked to them like robbers and burglars and they used as a pretext the less serious crime arrest to find out whether the particular person they were arresting had a warrant our for a felony and was a bad actor. In the immortal words of Jack Maple, who wrote that book in the late ’90s, they were looking for sharks not for dolphins.

Now there are some real problems of selection and minority with that strategy, but having said that, it doesn’t do us any good to misconstrue what the strategy was and to announce that somehow it was the maintenance of order that created the high crime impact. The reason that order maintenance can’t do that is because serious crime is deeply more concentrated in the worse parts of the city than order-maintenance issues. So you have to decide where you are going to invest your resources. And what New York City’s police department did from Day One was to invest their resources where serious crime was.

Doesn’t it send a worrisome message to other cities, that potentially racist stop-and-frisk policies may have been so successful in New York?

You bet it does. But there was a whole kitchen sink full of changes that took place in New York City policing. Now the question is, was all of this aggressiveness — focused on poor minority males in high-crime neighborhoods — necessary to these dramatically successful results? And the answer is a resounding “we don’t know.” We don’t know how necessary the most costly parts of aggressive policing are to the results of policing in New York. We don’t have a detailed crime control recipe book here. I’d love to have written the Julia Child cookbook of urban crime control. Here’s the recipe for an 80 percent reduction that will work in your neighborhood! We are way away from that. We don’t know how we can produce 80 percent in Toledo or in Seattle or wherever.

One thing you point out that was very important for the overall decline of crime in New York  was the decline in open-air drug markets. 

The largest growth in police efforts during the 1990s was in narcotics. The narcotics squad was increased not by the 40 percent that was the police expansion, but by 137 percent between 1990 and 1999. And what the cops did was destroy public drug markets — places where ordinary citizens would have to stay away, places with incredible rates of homicide — and for a particular reason. If I’m a drug seller in a public drug market and you’re a drug seller in a public market, we’re both going to want to go to the corner where most of the customers are. But that means that we are going to have conflict about who gets the corner. And when you have conflict and you’re in the drug business, you’re generally armed and violence happens.

The good news is that drug violence went down tremendously. There are a couple of different ways in which the police department measures the number of killings associated with drug traffic in New York; both of those measures that they use are down more than 90 percent so that the streets themselves have been changed, people can walk there, and the number of dead bodies associated with illegal drug traffic has gone way, way down. Now what happened to the amount of drug use in New York City, to cocaine and heroine ingestion? And all of the indications that we have on that, and there are lots of ways of measuring it, suggest that illegal drug use was really relatively stable, that the amount of heroine and cocaine ingested in 2009 in New York is not hugely different from the percentage of the population using cocaine and heroine in 1990 or the amount of cocaine and heroine they use. Now our cocaine users are a little bit older in the later period there, but the big difference is between the drug use, which is relatively stable, and the drug violence, which has gone way down.

The hard-line notions of William Bennett, our first national drug czar, was that the only effective way to go after the costs, the violence, the HIV of drug abuse, would be to substantially reduce drug use. And that was the official policy in this country for many years. The opposite approach, the public health approach, was called harm reduction. And what the harm reduction advocates said, and these were usually people who were doctors or masters of public health, they said, Look, if you are interested in something like HIV transmission, go after that. And, among other things, they suggested to exchange clean needles for dirty ones. That was something that the all-out drug warriors hated. Now the New York City police strategy wasn’t an all-out war on drugs in which all drug arrests are created equal. They went after the harm-producing public drug markets and they invested all their resources in taking the most violence-prone aspects of drug use and targeting them. The focused priorities were on the costs associated with drugs, not the number of people who were taking drugs or the number of kilos of drugs.

One of the really interesting things that comes out of the book is that, although many different kinds of crime in New York have decreased dramatically, and yet violent crime remains proportionally high when you compare them to cities like Toronto and Paris. Does this mean there is a different kind of criminal in New York City — a more violent one?

Fifteen years ago Gordon Hawkins and I published a book called “Crime Is Not the Problem,” about lethal violence in the United States. The big contrast in New York after its crime decline is this: Everything went way down, but when you compare this tremendously successful crime control effort in an American city with what the situation is in other world capitals, you get a very different contrast. For auto theft and for burglary, the rates of crime and presumably the number of active criminals in New York City is less than it is in London, is less than it is in Paris, or in Toronto, or in Montreal. We have less property crime and presumably less property criminals than other major Western cities. But when you look at our homicide and robbery rates, they are still higher in New York City and would be higher in Los Angeles and other American cities than in Western capitals.

And the reason for that may explain the cultural limits of what I have been calling situational and contingent crime control. There is simply more of a streak of violence in American urban populations and what that suggests is that while we have been tremendously successful in crime and violence reduction using just situational and contingent, essentially superficial remedies, at some point the effectiveness of those superficial remedies ends. You are going to scrape bottom. The homicide rate in New York City went from 30 per 100,000 to under six per 100,000. That’s phenomenal. If you had asked me 20 years ago whether that were possible, I would have assured it wasn’t. But with that under six per 100,000 I think you start bumping up against the limits of what happens in a country that still has a lot of guns and an awful lot of structural inequality, and an awful lot of social isolation in urban ghetto and barrio areas.

We have to be talking about making deeper changes before we get to larger progress. Nothing is going to make New York City into Tokyo or Hong Kong or Beijing. Cultures are different and susceptibility to levels of violence as a problem-solving mechanism is much more deeply engrained in the American city than in many areas of the modern world. Most of the extreme problems of violence as well as crime that New York was experiencing in 1990, and that other American cities had been experiencing on a chronic level, can be effectively addressed without the basic progress that we all think would be better. So we don’t have to fix the schools, and we don’t have to fix the economy, and we don’t have to fix the culture to reduce 80 percent of our violence problem. That’s wonderful news. It still would be a good idea to fix the culture, and the economy, and the schools, but we’ve got more time to do it and more freedom to experiment with those deeper substantive changes because we are living in a world where crime would be much less of a problem.

The Daily News notes this is almost certainly the beginning, not the end, of litigation surrounding the park:

The decision is likely to be appealed, so it was unclear if the city would immediately reopen the park to people without tents.

Here’s the full ruling, signed by Judge Michael Stallman:

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