New York also has been getting increasingly richer. Mrs. Jensen's kids almost certainly don't have a deep-seated desire to commit robbery, they want the materia

New York also has been getting increasingly richer. Mrs. Jensen's kids almost certainly don't have a deep-seated desire to commit robbery, they want the material results of having committed a robbery. If you want to stop robbery, getting better at catching Gary only makes him faster at running; you need to prevent Gary from deciding that joining his friends in a robbery is the most rational option. There are a few criminals who genuinely are motivated by the crime itself (serial killers, rapists, etc.), aka "want crime" - but for exactly that reason, they're unlikely to be influenced by a change in the "atmosphere of crime." For most quality-of-life crime (including organized crime!), criminals are rational economic actors like anyone else. They don't want crime, they want to get up the first layer of Maslow's pyramid. During Giuliani's tenure, unemployment in Manhattan dropped from almost 10% to 5%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYNEWY1URN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYNEWY1URN The median income rose from $54K to $93K, which even adjusting for inflation is a >40% increase: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 The number of people below the poverty line dropped from 340K to 270K even as population grew slightly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 (None of this is to say Giuliani was or wasn't responsible for the changes, just to propose an alternative causality than the attack on crime. Nor does it ask where the unemployed or poor in Manhattan went or to defend it, it's only looking at the statistics. And also none of this is to say that Gary isn't morally culpable for his deeds, it's just that the goal of reducing crime isn't the same as the goal of assigning moral culpability.)