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.”
Again, the book is not content to rest with the modest claim that police intervention and the removal of disorder merely makes people feel safer. Its ambitions are higher. Moskos presses a stronger argument that the diligent work of the beat cop, the creativity and vision of police leaders like Bratton, and the political buy-in of elected officials such as Mayor Rudy Giuliani made the city safer in real terms—not just perceived ones. Given the scale of the policing revolution described by his interviewees and observed by their contemporaries, this is hardly unreasonable.