New York City engineered a crime decline miracle in the 90s. Rudy Giuliani and his police chief Bernard Kerik used the pure power of policing, including aggressive gun confiscations and “stop and frisk,” to slash the city’s murder rate from over 2,000 a year to under 300.

The city started to suffer a steady corrosion of this legacy under Bill DeBlasio, who took over as mayor in 2021 and hemmed in policing power with intrusive regulations insensitive to the realities of urban crime. Then, in 2020, that corrosion was turbocharged when the country’s “racial reckoning” powered a horde of anti-police activists into city government.