Make-or-Break Moment for NYCHA Crime-Reduction? Mixed Results for Public-Housing Action Plan
“We keep our promises to our public housing residents,” said Mayor de Blasio earlier this month, as he announced a milestone in his Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety (MAP). Announced in July 2014, the plan targets 15 especially violent public housing developments with extended community center hours, anti-domestic violence workshops, summer youth outreach, more cops, better lighting and security resources like CCTV cameras.
“These next few months may prove make-or-break for the Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety. Its performance during the summer crime season merits close scrutiny.”
In 2015, the initiative did keep its promises, successfully reducing MAP developments’ violent crime to par with the rest of the city’s NYCHA public housing projects. So far this year, though, crime in MAP developments hasn’t improved, which should throw up a yellow flag. It’s early yet, but the stakes are rising as index crime continues to worsen for NYCHA residents living outside the 15 targeted developments.
To achieve its goal of crime reduction, the plan emphasizes the restoration of community and public order in long-neglected developments. This neglect occurred on multiple levels: physically, with the dilapidation of buildings, streets, and sidewalks; and culturally, with rampant crime and domestic violence. Fixing these “broken windows” in NYCHA communities, both physically and culturally, should be expected to reduce crime over time, in concert with the tangible security investments made by the plan.
As encouraging as MAP and related initiatives are on an intuitive level, we must mind the data. MAP developments have maintained their 2015 relative gains, and are no longer disproportionately violent by NYCHA standards-but NYCHA’s violent crime rate is getting worse, up 4.6% since the beginning of the year.
This should give tentative reason for concern. MAP is graded on a curve against the rest of NYCHA, in order to control for unobservable confounding variables that affect crime during the policy experiment. This year, MAP developments are earning the same “grade” on violent crime as in 2015...
Read the entire piece here in New York Daily News
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Alex Armlovich is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News