MORE THAN A FEELING:
How New York City Got Safe: A historical reconstruction of the Big Apple’s crime decline, told from inside the institutions responsible for public safety. (Michael Javen Fortner, January 1, 2026, Washington Monthly)
Bill Bratton—who, as transit police chief, launched a “broken windows” strategy on the subway in 1990—told Moskos that he embraced the approach because whenever he went into communities, he “heard people complaining about broken windows.” “Even in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods—they used to complain about crime, certainly—but what I came to understand was that everyday people were seeing this crazy city and what a mess that was,” Bratton said.
It is tempting to dismiss statements like this as self-serving, post hoc justification. But the survey evidence tells a strikingly similar story. A 1979 survey of residents in Harlem and the South Bronx underscores just how central quality-of-life concerns—both physical decay and behavioral disorder—were to the city’s most marginalized communities. The single most frequently cited problem was bad or slum housing (29 percent), followed closely by drugs (25 percent) and crime and criminals (22 percent). In Harlem, these anxieties were sharper still: 32 percent identified bad housing as the top concern, 29 percent pointed to drugs, and 23 percent referred to crime. Beneath these headline categories sat a dense layer of everyday disorder. Robberies and muggings were cited by 12 percent of respondents citywide (15 percent in the Bronx), abandoned or burned-out housing by 11 percent overall (15 percent in the Bronx), and juvenile delinquency by 7 percent. Smaller but still telling shares pointed to littered streets (6 percent), vandalism (4 percent), lack of sanitation (4 percent), public drunkenness (2 percent), and fires (3 percent overall, rising to 6 percent in the Bronx)—the very conditions that made public space feel unstable and threatening.
Nearly a decade later, these concerns had not abated. Even as homicide rates continued to climb, a 1988 survey of New York State residents commissioned by the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services revealed the persistence—and salience—of quality-of-life anxieties. Nearly three-fifths of residents reported that their neighborhoods suffered from at least one “quality of life” problem: rowdy youth, homeless people, or crumbling buildings. Almost half complained about disorderly teenagers; nearly a third cited problems with homeless people; another third pointed to physical decay. As these problems accumulated, fear spiked. Only about one in 10 residents of trouble-free neighborhoods reported feeling unsafe out alone at night; among those living amid two or three major problems, that figure rose to nearly 60 percent.
Taken together, these numbers tell a story that crime rates alone cannot. Residents did not draw neat distinctions between “serious crime” and “minor disorder”; they experienced both as part of a single moral and environmental unraveling. The persistence of concerns about dirty streets, abandoned buildings, vandalism, and insufficient police protection—often registering in double-digit shares in the hardest-hit neighborhoods—helps explain why order maintenance policing resonated so deeply with the public. Fear was not produced by violence alone, but by the steady accumulation of visible signals that no one was in charge and by unwanted encounters with “disreputable,” “obstreperous,” or “unpredictable” individuals, including “rowdy teenagers,” drug users, and the homeless. In this view, “safety”—or at least the perception of it—was secured as much through the removal of these perceived threats as through declining crime rates. That, at least, is a key claim Moskos’s book presses with unusual force.
One of Moskos’s interviewees, Steve Hill, a transit cop, gets to the heart of the matter with disarming clarity. Order maintenance, he explains, was “more about acknowledging the things that made people feel unsafe,” even if “the violent predators are still going to be out there shooting and killing people.” It sounds like a concession, but it is the opposite. Hill is insisting that reducing fear, reclaiming public space, and pushing back disorder matter in their own right—not because they shave a few points off homicide rates, but because they reshape how ordinary New Yorkers experience the city.
Hill’s stories make that point concrete. He recalls a morning train disrupted by a homeless man “pissing,” shouting, and driving passengers “crazy,” until an officer seized the moment—“‘This is your stop, buddy.’ Boom!”—and threw him onto the platform. “No paperwork,” Hill notes, and as the doors closed “the entire train applauded.” The applause is key. It captures a public worn down by daily disorder and viscerally grateful when someone finally intervened. Elsewhere, Hill recalls how riders at Utica Avenue during rush hour were “happy to see” an officer in uniform. For every person who cursed or spit, he observed, “ten others will appreciate you being here.” What people valued was not abstract crime control, but the simple assurance that they could sit on a train without worrying about “somebody crazy walking up on them, spitting or littering or urinating or defecating.”