STUDY SAYS A SLUMPING ECONOMY DOESN'T MEAN CRIME WILL RISE

Higher unemployment and a faltering economy will not necessarily lead to
higher crime in New York City if the police continue their effective
enforcement efforts, according to a study released yesterday by the
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

In fact, the researchers found that many areas of New York that had higher
unemployment in recent years actually had slightly sharper declines in
crime, in part because of innovative patrol strategies by police officers.

"They really make a difference," said Prof. George L. Kelling, a
criminologist at Rutgers University and a co-author of the study, titled
"Do Police Matter? An Analysis of the Impact of New York City's Police
Reforms."

Professor Kelling is a senior fellow at the institute, a conservative
research group, and is an author of the "broken windows" theory, which says
that the key to fighting crime is to address all offenses, even seemingly
minor ones. In remarks yesterday at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan,
Professor Kelling said his study was intended to empirically test the
assumption that the decline in the use of crack cocaine and the booming
economy of the 1990's had more to do with the drop in crime than police
enforcement efforts.

As part of the analysis, the researchers looked at crime statistics for all
76 police precincts from 1989 to 1998 and correlated them against data that
measured the borough unemployment rates, the number of young men in the
neighborhoods and the use of cocaine. They found that crime dropped sharply
in nearly every precinct, including those that had widely divergent numbers
of poor people or drug users.

In particular, the study found no evidence that the declining use of
cocaine, as measured by hospital discharges for cocaine-related episodes,
was associated with a drop in crime, or that the escalating use was
associated with an increase.

More likely, Professor Kelling said, the declines were precipitated by the
"broken windows" approach to law enforcement, in which the police made many
more misdemeanor arrests for lesser offenses in hopes of creating a sense
of social order that deterred crime.

Alfred Blumstein, a professor of criminology at Carnegie Mellon University,
said he was not convinced that the study had damaged the thesis that the
economy and a drop-off in drug use were important contributing factors. For
one thing, he said, the data used to measure unemployment was too blunt and
unreliable.