The Collapse of Broken-Windows Policing in New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, 2013–22

George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, was followed by protest marches and riots. The Black Lives Matter movement mushroomed in size, funding, and influence. Mayors and city council members in major cities—New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles among them—urged that police funding be slashed.

In the following months, crime became more intrusive. Cities around the country experienced large increases in shoplifting, forcing many small businesses into bankruptcy and eventually leading major chains such as Walmart, Best Buy, and Target to close stores. In some cities, the number of homicides surged. In others, daily life began to resemble the New York City of the 1970s and 1980s, when citizens had to worry about daytime muggings and lived in an environment of panhandlers and graffiti.

The timing led to a widespread impression that George Floyd’s death had marked a break point in urban crime. I shared that impression and set out to test it.

The graphs and tables that follow are based on two datasets. One consists of the numbers for offenses and arrests assembled from the annual volumes of the FBI’s Crime in the United States (CIUS) from 1950 to 2019.[i] The series ends in 2019 because the FBI has subsequently transitioned to a different system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System, making national estimates of crime rates incomplete and unreliable because of problems in the transition (the FBI relies on the voluntary participation of local police agencies) combined with the measures taken to control COVID-19 in 2020. However, the second dataset makes it possible to extend an analysis through 2022 for the three cities that are the focus of this paper. It consists of the complete arrest records for New York City from 2006 to 2022, Los Angeles from 2010 to 2022, and Washington, DC, from 2013 to 2022. This dataset and its documentation may be downloaded at the American Enterprise Institute’s website.

What I found was more complicated than a pre-Floyd/post-Floyd discontinuity. The years after 2020 did see new outbreaks of crime, but the years leading up to 2020 had paved the way.

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