by Adam Walinsky

About the author: Adam Walinsky is a lawyer and a long-time advocate of the Police Corps, which trains students to become police officers.

All through 1993 official agencies claimed that crime was declining. The FBI said that violent crime in the first six months was down three percent overall, and down eight percent in the Northeast.

One Long Descending Night

For crime to be down even eight percent would mean that a precinct that had had a hundred murders in 1992 had ninety-two in 1993. But nobody came around on New Year’s Day of 1993 to give everyone’s memory a rinse, obliterating the horrors of the previous year. The effect is not disjunctive but cumulative. By the end of 1993, ninety-two additional people had been murdered.

Many people can also remember years before 1992, in large cities and in small. In 1960, for...