-The New York Times, February 3, 2012 by N. R. Kleinfield, Al Baker and Joseph Goldstein
http://nyti.ms/wWPYie
Franklin E. Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied New York’s crime record, said, “In a funny sense, the department is and has been for some time a victim of its own success.” He added: “Anybody in that job has got to play a constant game of, ‘Can you top this?’ And that has been a hard game to play.”
-Chicago News Cooperative, February 10, 2012 by James Warren
http://www.chicagonewscoop.org/warren-new-yorks-lessons-on-fighting-crime-2/
Nothing really seems to account for New York’s differences other than increases in police resources and strategies focused on serious crime, and not, according to Mr. Zimring, the often mythologized “quality of life,” or so-called “broken windows” strategies that concentrate on, say, public prostitution or gambling.
-The New York Times, February 11, 2012 by Ross Douthat
http://nyti.ms/wakIJr
Prison is a school for crime and an anchor on advancement, and there’s a large body of research — from scholars like U.C.L.A.’s Mark Kleiman and Berkeley’s Franklin E. Zimring — suggesting that swift, certain punishment and larger police forces can do as much to keep crime low as the more draconian approach to sentencing that our justice system often takes.