Why is New York City So Safe? And What Can That Tell us About Achieving Safety Elsewhere?

Over the past three decades, New York City has witnessed its crime and incarceration rates plummet to depths unthinkable in the crime and incarceration-ridden days of my youth growing up in Brooklyn. Today, it’s no exaggeration to say that the city eviscerated in 1970s movies ranging from The Warriors to The Out of Towners is now one of the safest and least incarcerated cities in the United States.

Why is New York so safe, even though it incarcerates so few of its residents relative to the rest of the U.S.? And why has the city gotten even safer over the past three decades even as the number of people incarcerated in the city — young and old —- has plummeted?

During my 45 years in the criminal and juvenile justice field, it has always seemed to me that elected officials spend a lot of time asking themselves why certain people or places are dangerous. Too often, the answer — unaccompanied by data or meaningful introspection — is that someone (presumably, not them) is soft on crime. Then, the menu of “usual suspect” solutions is trotted out. Mandatory sentences. Adult time for adult crime. Stop-and-frisk.

But, with some exceptions, we don’t ask ourselves the opposite question often enough. Why is it that some places are able to achieve safety despite, or perhaps because of, less punishment?

In the Big Apple, part of the answer seems to be a simple concept that involves incredibly hard work: more community support, less unnecessary system involvement. I’m encouraged that the city’s next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is interested in building further on that progress.

New York City, where I’m now a visiting fellow with the Pinkerton Foundation, presents a dilemma for “lock ‘em up” advocates. Since 1990, its incarceration numbers have plunged. Back then, for example, city jails held 22,000 people. The city’s jail population is now down to 6,400.

Likewise, in 2000, there were 1,500 young people from New York City in the state’s youth prisons. Following passage of the Close to Home Act (C2H), which shifted responsibility for all of New York City’s Family Court youth from the state to the city, there are now no city kids who are adjudicated in its Family Court in state custody, and only around 100 kids in the city’s small, local residential facilities.

During this record-setting decline in incarceration, crime has also plummeted. Writing in 2011, U.C. Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring dubbed New York City’s crime decline “the largest and longest sustained drop in street crime ever experienced by a big city in the developed world.” Since then, the city cleared this high bar; from January through May 2025, the city experienced the lowest number of shootings and murders in its history.

It’s difficult to prove with certainty why this is, but I’m going to expand on a heartening hypothesis that I’ve written about before that has been buoyed by my experience visiting Pinkerton’s grantees. I believe that New York’s unique combination of many vibrant nonprofits — large and small — coupled with forward-thinking philanthropies and open-minded officials, has for decades provided a growing cadre of programs for people either returning home from confinement or in lieu of it that helps them matriculate out of crime and into productive lives.

This web of support for people enmeshed in the legal system cannot be overstated. Some of the larger nonprofits like the Fortune Society and the Center for Justice Innovation have budgets over $100 million dollars, rivaling the city’s (and most other jurisdictions’) budget for its probation department and serving thousands of people annually. These organizations, with decades of experience and some research showing that they both reduce the number of people the city incarcerates and improve public safety, are widely known in the city’s legal and advocacy community.

Less well known — but no less important — is a network of smaller organizations grounded in their communities and the lived experience of their staff which are helping to not only directly provide services, support and opportunities to young people in their neighborhoods, but also contribute to their community’s cohesiveness in ways that extend way beyond individual benefits. Here are just a few of them.

Justice for Families in the South Bronx provides advocacy training for families of system-impacted youth throughout the country, but they also do deep and long-lasting case advocacy and cross-systems navigation for young people in their neighborhood.  Beyond that, the “staff” there (many of whom have lived experience or system-involved children and are serving as pro bono advocates for others) feed hungry families, organize to make sure that developers don’t take advantage of their community, and joust with city agencies when they are harming their neighborhoods. When I asked Founder Jeanette Bocanegra how they fund all this outside-the-box work, she showed me a picture of her mother hosting a flea market outside their offices every year from April to October and contributing her earnings to the organization. (They also receive funding from foundations and donations).

The Harlem-based Lead by Example & Reverse the Trend is staffed by a dynamic group of people with lived experience, many of whom were involved in the juvenile or criminal legal systems and are now giving back by helping young people work their way out of system involvement. They not only combine mentorship with cognitive behavioral therapy and independent living resources but, recognizing that young people need a path out of poverty, they operate several neighborhood-based businesses where their participants can gain paid work experience.

We Build the Block describes itself as an “organization bringing our community together to build the future of public safety. We create community-developed and led models proven to reduce violence and increase safety.” We Build leads with empowerment of youth and communities, providing support and services for and with young people and communities that refuses to be boxed into any department’s silos — be they child welfare, probation, housing, education, or mental health. They recognize that kids and families have strengths but also face challenges that cross departmental categories and caseloads.

Research into the city’s impressive network of community programs is nowhere near as ubiquitous as the programs themselves. Still, when city leaders decided to close the Rikers Island jails and replace them with smaller, borough-based jails, they funded a network of nonprofits to provide supervision and support for people who were released. Independent evaluations found those programs to be largely successful, achieving their goals of reducing pretrial detention and money bail without increasing rearrests.

Likewise, in the two years prior to the creation of Close to Home, youth crime declined by 24%. In the four years following C2H, when the city funded a network of programs for its youth and deinstitutionalizated youth adjudicated in the city’s Family Court, youth crime in the City declined by 52%.

Princeton’s Patrick Sharkey and his colleagues have evaluated the community-level impacts that this type of programming can have on community outcomes. Sharkey and the doctoral students Gerard Torrats-Espinosa and Delaram Takyar tracked the rise in the number of nonprofit organizations in 264 cities over 20 years, years that corresponded with a halving of the number of homicides in the United States. They found that every 10 additional organizations added to a city per 100,000 residents led to a 9% drop in the murder rate and a 6% drop in violent crime. Using data from 77 New York City precincts from 2000 to 2016 in a subsequent study, Torrats-Espinoza found that as the number of nonprofits grew by 74% in those neighborhoods, crime dropped by 32%. Youth development programs yielded the greatest results.