>and also, has the causal claim (policing -> crime reduction) been
>sufficiently reasoned out elsewhere? searching the web shows me
>that there is a definite statistical correlation (at least if one
>website is to be believed, crime in NYC is 3% of national crime,
>the reduction of crime in NYC contributed to 70% of the reduction
>nationwide). are there alternative possible causes? such as the
>economy boom (which i would guess also favoured NYC
>disproportionately)? could there be a mix of these causes?
Freeman & Rodgers have an NBER working paper <http://papers.nber.org/papers/W7073> that looked at employment, earnings, crime, and incarceration rates in major metropolitan areas. They found (I'm doing this from memory - don't have the paper at hand, and I'm too cheap to d/l it again) that a strong job market could explain lower crime rates in some areas, but in those where the job market was weak, incarceration did the trick. New York City was one of the weak job market/high incarceration zones. We had a boom here, but it wasn't widely shared; employment was weak at the low end, and earnings fell.
Given the recent propensity to misinterpreting what I say, I think repression sucks, and that our high incarceration rate is a disgrace. But it's wrong to say that repression, like violence, is ineffective or even counterproductive. Both very often produce the results that ruling classes want; they're one of the main routes by which they remain a ruling class. When Engels wrote about "special bodies of armed men," I don't think he was doing so because he had a uniform fetish.
Doug