The miracle of New York

It appears that the remarkable reversal in New York cities crime rates at the beginning of the 1990’s has become something of a political tennis ball, battered back and forth between various politicians and professors at an impressive tempo. Any social theorist worth his salt in the last decade has attempted to squeeze this vastly complicated phenomena into the cramped confides of their life work. I remember myself thinking it bizarre when I visited the city a few years ago to be told by my friend that the bright and busy street we were then walking through had until recently been an area in which even the police hadn't dared to enter.

I forgot about all this until the theme came about in Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘The Tipping Point’, and I was smitten with his idea that it owed a lot to the theory of ‘broken window’ crime prevention that was adopted by the new police chief in the 1980’s. This idea assumes that by cracking down hard on things like petty vandalism and fare dodging an aura of social ‘respect’ (sound familiar?) begins to prevail which eventually brings even the most hardened criminals into line. The underlying notion being that it is ones immediate environment that causes one to sin, not necessarily ones upbringing. I don’t think this was Gladwell’s idea in the first place but it was certainly the first place that I read about it.

So I was totally convinced by this until I read ‘Freakonomics’ in which Steven Levitt attributes the reversal in crime rates to a law passed nearly twenty years earlier in the landmark ‘Roe vs Wade’ supreme court ruling. This was the law that made abortion legal throughout the United States. Levitt’s attractive argument, put simply, was that this ruling prevented criminals being born. Statistically it is children from young, single parent families that are more likely to turn to crime. Roe vs Wade dramatically reduced this social category and hence, twenty years later when the children of the 70’s were reaching the peak of their crime committing capacity – not a lot happened. Once again I was smitten.

So today when I saw the Edinburgh Evening News running with the shocking headline that on average ‘One City Teenage Girl A Day Has Abortion’, I cracked a morbid smile. While this probably represents more a lack of education and/or access to contraception I still think it’s encouraging to see young girls exercising their right to commit murder in the name of convenience (and future social harmony).

Now if we can just clear away some of the litter and patch up a few buildings here and there, utopia is finally within reach – right?