How New York City Got Safe

As he is sworn in today, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani takes office having already drawn a sharp line with the city’s recent past, pledging, among other things, to end police sweeps of homeless encampments. This marks a clean break from the ethos of order maintenance policing that once defined New York’s anti-crime strategies in the 1990s and early 2000s. When the outgoing mayor announced encampment sweeps in the spring of 2022, he gave voice to the same righteous indignation that animated that earlier era of law enforcement...