“While there is some variance by type of crime, the best rule of thumb for comparing the magnitude of New York City’s crime decline to that of the rest of the United States is that any crime drop for the rest of the United States is doubled in New York City,” criminologist Franklin Zimring observes. “In the same spirit that media were prone to choose a city as the ‘murder capital’ of the United States when crime statistics were issued, New York City was beyond dispute the Crime Decline Capital of the United States in the 1990s.”
