Zimring's The City That Became Safe

Prior to reading Zimring’s, The City that Became Safe, I had a general understanding of the national crime decline, beginning in the last decade of the 20th century, continuing into the early 21st century. In addition, there were concepts that were brought up consistently throughout my previous JLC classes – Nixon and Regan’s War on Drugs, the Crack-Cocaine Epidemic, Super Predators – that began to appear, at least to me, as simple terms, to explain a complex issue. Individuals would use these concepts as keywords, coupled with the increase in incarceration (i.e., mass incarceration) that served as a deterrent to rising recidivism rates, to explain the crime drop across the nation, without a deeper appreciation and understanding as to the deeper significance of each ‘key term.’ As I will later discuss, these individuals are known as naïve consumers of information. Nonetheless, as I began to delve into the novel, Zimring brought up a topic known as the “New York Difference,” which refers to an unsolved element or technique implemented within New York City that served as a catalyst for the boosted decline in their crime rates, years after the national trend began stabilizing. Nonetheless, I would soon come to realize how – as Zimring mentioned – “little all of us know about criminology,” to the extent of understanding why these index crimes (e.g., homicide, robbery, rape) occurred in great numbers prior to the 1990’s and the techniques that

Throughout my critical analysis of Zimring’s research, I will focus on some of the components he discussed – Zero Tolerance Policing, the Crack Cocaine Epidemic, the youth cohort, racial disparities, and the statistics that recorded this – followed by some additional research to paint a fuller picture on the crime rates outlined in his work, and other promising factors and techniques – which he may have failed to include or provide the importance it deserved – that may have or, if implemented, could have contributed to the