Not Entertainment

[kandrathe]

It's tough to separate out the role Giuliani played from other potential causative factors. I think he did less than people think he did, and instead is receiving credit for the overall decline in crime, seen in many cities, at the end of the crack boom. (Or possibly the first legalized abortion generation, if you believe Levitt.) But the extra boots on the ground involved in harassing squeegee guys and arresting people with tattoos and weird haircuts no doubt reduced crime.

I guess it's the setting of the norm. If you set the norm that there is no graffiti, no bums hustling/begging, and no broken down ugliness permeating the environment, then maybe people begin to take some pride in keeping things looking good.

What makes me somewhat skeptical of this kind of "swamp draining" is that its unit of analysis seems to be the territory, rather than the crime itself. Simply moving crime from point A to point B by demolishing point A is not a net advantage, but if you were only looking at the one neighborhood, it might well appear to be a success.

I agree in part, that when you squeeze one area, the ooze goes somewhere else. But, I think that if you keep pressing, and creating intolerance for it, it weakens and eventually becomes dispersed throughout a larger area, perhaps so much that it become aberrant and not normal. That actually happened in Minneapolis. The epicenter of homicide would move as efforts were increased to reform that area. But, when you look at the homicide pins in the map now, you'd see less of a clear geography.

He should go to jail for possession of the heroine. Kidnapping is illegal!

Possession is not kidnapping. Yet, he is no hero, and as such, has no right to have a heroine. Staying with him is heroic enough.

Darn spell checker! It catches me when I misspell, but not when I misspell to another word!