Sept. 8, 2025 — Peter Moskos, a professor of law, police science and criminal justice administration at John J. College of Criminal Justice, is the author of “Back From the Brink,” which tells the story of a transformation in policing in New York City that began in the mid-1990s. The way Moskos tells the story, a key, basic lesson is that, in fact, “we can police our way out of a lot of urban problems.”
The interview covers a lot of ground, starting with the New York City of the 1970’s and 1980’s where, Moskos says, the Police Department failed to have the reduction of crime as a goal, failed to put data to good use, failed to communicate effectively internally, and failed to have accountability measures in place.
He recounts changes initiated under Police Commissioner William Bratton beginning in 1994 — most notably the introduction of Comstat (and accompanying demands for accountability for achieving crime-reduction results) — as well as the introduction of what is commonly referred to as broken-windows policing.
In the conversation, Moskos takes pains to distinguish broken-windows policing as it was implemented in the 1990’s, allowing police “a legal reason to be in contact with violent offenders before they committed violent crime,” from the later era, from 2014 through 2012, which was characterized by what Moskos calls the “stop-question-and-frisk debacle.”
He reminds listeners that there has been an extraordinary drop in murders in New York City from its peak of about 2,200.
Other topics include the critical importance of getting guns off the streets (despite opposition from elements of both right and left); the role of a Police Department versus a Department of Community Safety; how to have a Civilian Complaint Review Board that is tough and fair and the same time; what needs to be done about crime in the subway.
Moskos expressed deep qualms about the prospect of a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty.
Transcript notes: You can click anywhere on the transcript. If the audio is already playing, it will skip to the selected point. If the audio is not playing, first select the desired text, then press play. On some browers the in-transcript search function is only highlighting hits, not scrolling down into them. If that happens, just use the regular “find” function in your browser. The transcript was lightly edited for audio clarity.
Transcript
Gurian: I am joined today by Peter Moskos, professor of law, police science and criminal justice administration at John J. College of Criminal Justice and author most recently of “Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop.” Thank you for joining me, Peter.
Moskos: Oh, thanks for inviting me on. Gurian: Before we get to the key lessons, or as you put it in the preface, sometimes we must repeat history precisely . . . sometimes we must remember history, remember precisely so we can precisely we say, so we can repeat it. Could you paint a quick picture of what the scope of crime in New York City was like in the 1970s? As it happens, I lived through it, but tell our audience.
Moskos: Well, it’s probably more interesting to hear the lived experience. I mean, I can I’m from Chicago. I did not, I mean, it’s a similar path, but I did not live through that. But I will say I first visited New York in 1988 and I’m, there were 1,896 murders that year. Peaked in 1990 with over 2,200 murders. It was a city that many thought was doomed. I mean, the nadir may have been a bit earlier for the city with the near bankruptcy in 1975 that led to the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” headline. But it was just seen as falling apart at sort of, at the seams and people were leaving, you know, the tax base was shrinking and, and just, you know, the, the level of not just murders… I look at that ‘cause I trust the numbers on that more than other crime stats. But, you know, the robberies and quality of life issues. The graffiti on the train until the late eighties: all these things contributed to this feeling that the city was just going to hell. And then it didn’t. Gurian: Well, and it wasn’t I take your point on the reliability or the greater reliability of murder statistics as compared with other crimes — but there’s a there’s a big spectrum between murder and graffiti — and so there were certainly lots of assaults, burglaries, and robberies as well. Yes? Moskos: Yeah. All those other crimes. But I, part of it, I mean, part of it was very real, part of it was perception. Because even when the city’s dangerous, if you don’t live in a high crime neighborhood, the odds are you won’t be victimized. Though a lot of people were victimized at some point, especially when you take things like car thefts. I mean, you know, so a lot of people use those quality of life indicators that they see as sort of a proxy for the idea that nobody’s in control. And then, and if you do live in a neighborhood with a lot of shootings, I mean, you just heard gunshots on a daily basis and you know, and just, I mean, of course if you get shot, it’s far worse, but to some extent even that’s just a quality of life issue. Oh, do gunshots bother you? Yes! I’m trying to have dinner or do homework or go to bed and, and there’s shooting going on out there. Gurian: Right. Or not be frightened out of my mind. I did wanna underline the point you made in passing and just have you confirm this, that back then, as now, crime was not at all evenly distributed through all neighborhoods or anything close to that. There were vast differences, neighborhood to neighborhood. Yes? Moskos: Yeah. Crime was and remains extremely segregated by geography. And, you know, if you zoom down even more than you see, it’s, you know, it is a few people, a comparatively few people, I should say. It was a lot of criminals. But comparatively few people that just do so much destruction and by and large that happens in, they don’t, there are some exceptions, but they don’t commute generally too far to do their business. The violence in the late eighties and into the early nineties skyrocketed because of crack cocaine. And it was, and specifically it was about the nature of that drug market, the public drug market. And if you have people slinging crack on the corner that is a magnet and a causation for violence and shootings. And that, you know, but it was a problem many ways that was seen as something that reflected greater society. And people went, you know, we can’t, there’s always the idea that we can’t police our way outta this. We have to fix everything. And if there’s, I guess any lesson from my book, I hope there are a few of them, but actually not that we shouldn’t fix those other issues, but we can police our way out of a lot of urban problems.
Gurian: Yeah. I do wanna talk about how, policing and other approaches can be complementary even though a lot of public discourse seems to be “No policing!” “All policing! ” But let’s first go through the principal lessons of what happened in New York in the 1990s. And you said it very broadly, but if you could expand on “Yes, we can police our way out of it.”
Moskos: To understand, and this is why Back from the Brink starts earlier, partly to follow the, a little bit of the lives and careers of the people involved because the leaders of the nineties came on in by and large, the early seventies . And when the police department before Bratton was appointed police commissioner in 94, simply wasn’t focused as an organization. It wasn’t focused on crime. And that may sound weird. But anyway, they were trying to avoid corruption. They were trying to avoid scandal. They were trying to avoid race riots and other forms of urban unrest. And, you know, the mentality was to a large extent, “well, sometimes crime goes up, sometimes crime goes down and life goes on.” And that was unacceptable to the new people in charge. And I mean, like, the example I like to give is Jack Maple, Bratton’s right-hand man, who was a lieutenant with him in the New York City Transit Police Department when that was a separate police department. And when they joined the NYPD he asked high ranking police chiefs in the department, you know, “How many people were shot last year?” Last year being 1993, and nobody knew. I mean, it’s hard to imagine that a police department, what wasn’t keeping track of how many people were shot. And they, I mean, they were keeping track of shootings, but no one was collecting that data because it didn’t, shooting isn’t a part one crime that goes to the uniform crime reports in the FBI. And so he said, well, let’s get those reports and count. Figure out how many people were shot. And I mean, the answer was nearly two thousand. Oh. I’m sorry, there were nearly 2,000 murders. The answer is nearly 6,000. You know, we still don’t know how many people were shot in the most violent year of 1990, but it was probably around 7,000 New Yorkers were shot that year. But we don’t know. No one was counting. So, I mean, in some sense that’s very obvious. But you start at that level. Let’s figure out what is happening, where it’s happening, when it’s happening. And then, you know, then the hard work starts. But that basic work of simply hadn’t been done before. And I mean, the other important shift in some ways was simply a mission statement that, Gurian: May I just interrupt you, may I just interrupt you for a moment before you go on to that because, in reading the early portions of the book, it was just very striking to me
how disorganized things were. Beyond the lack of data — and you need the data — but just in terms of lack of cooperation between different bureaus or parts of the department as though getting together and figuring out how to solve the problem — if you define that as crime — just had nothing to do with the, either the day-to-day work or the strategizing. Moskos: Yeah. And also as before computers, so, you know, everything’s on paper and it’s, you know, you have to physically figure out where that paper is. And I think it’s a natural thing in organizations for people to sort of silo themselves and say, “This is our stuff. We don’t want to give it up. ‘Cause if we give it up, we might never give it, get it back.” Yes, as, I mean, there’s so many ways that the department was dysfunctional, and one of those has simply given its size of, you know, at that, even when it was small, it was still nearly 30,000 cops and, you know, another 10,000 or more civilian workers the cops with civil service protection. So, you know, it’s very difficult to fire them, which is a management challenge, you know? But it just lumbered on, you know, it was this, this huge, and, you know, it lumbered on because it was essential. And it wasn’t that they were doing nothing. But they didn’t, you know, as Jack Maple said later when he was actually applying it to New Orleans, but there were lots of great musicians. Like, you know, there were cops here and there who were trying really hard, but there was no conductor bringing them all together into a symphony.
Gurian: So, a piece of the one of the insights is you have to get the data. And what are the other pieces? I interrupted you as you began to move on. Moskos: Oh, that when the mission statement part. I, yeah. It’s simply that Bratton came on and said there are two key parts to it. One is where police, the job of police is also to maintain order, public order in a civil society. So not just a crime fighting focus, but to focus on the little things. But then he also announced — this wasn’t in the mission statement — but he also announced we’re gonna bring down violent crime 15 percent this year. And that was, I believe, unprecedented.
In a way, what’s in it for the police commissioner to make a promise that — one people, a lot of so-called experts — think is impossible, but also, you know, he’s just setting himself up for failure. That was, it was bold, it was brash. It was incredibly confident that they said, “Yes, we can do this. We know how to do it. Now we’re in charge, so let’s go and do it.” And he did. You know, he brought down crime that year and then, you know, many people said, well, some years crime goes down and other years it goes up. But it kept on going down and even more and more pace at a faster pace. And that was the part that sort of, I think blew everybody’s mind. I mean, I should also mention I started graduate school in 1995, and this crime drop is what got me into the field of policing. It got me interested in it because I’m reading those experts in sociology and criminology saying that police don’t affect crime, we have to fix society. And meanwhile, I’m, “Are my eyes lying?” Like, no, this is really happening right now. So I thought there was gonna be a sort of in the Thomas Kuhnsian scientific revolution in the field, which there really wasn’t. But I thought, well, I wanna get in this on the ground floor now that there’s a new model of policing and crime prevention. Gurian: So, two pieces of this, which stand out in your book, and I think at least in a vague sense, stand out in public memory, and maybe in a contested sense are Comstat and broken windows policing. And at a point in the book, you quote Jack Maple as saying, “Comstat started to reveal something I had first suspected: that nobody was ever asked a follow up question.” What’s the significance of that? Moskos: It’s interesting ‘cause, you know, in the process of doing all the interviews for the book certain things just came up again and again. And, if it came up 10 times, it might be mentioned twice in the book. You know, you have to, as a writer, an editor, you have to make things flow. That came up so much. And the idea that the only thing people cared about was robbery, robberies, the bellwether, everyone said that word. And the idea was if you have 10 robberies, you needed to make three robbery or arrests. That was sort of the only standard that cops were held to in terms of crime. Now, it didn’t matter if that stopped the robberies. What matters is that you had three or four arrests for every 10 robberies going on. Life went on. That’s just kind of how it was. I mean, they ultimately, it’s that they had to, and it wasn’t that cops didn’t care, but it was just, they felt overwhelmed by this, by the massiveness of the organization and the massiveness of the city’s problems. And no one took responsibility for saying “we’re gonna do this.” That was, you know, ultimately the big change. It’s funny ‘cause there’s Back from the Brink is — organizational theory is not my field and yet the book ultimately is about organizational change. And to some extent, you know, the great man theory of history, which is also quite unpopular today. But it just, you know, simply wouldn’t have happened without the cadre of leaders that were in charge. Gurian: That’s what I wanted to ask you about. And I take it, you think that both of those things came together. You had to have the leadership and they had to be people who were thinking about and able to implement a new way of doing things.
Moskos: Yes. And I mean, yeah, but it’s interesting that it took so long and it certainly wasn’t inevitable. You know, Giuliani doesn’t feature very prominently in my book, but he did ‘cause — I mean, he’s not a cop. And I don’t think he was — I mean, he, he rode the wave of the crime drop. But, you know, he did appoint Bratton and that was a, that was I mean — of course he also then fired Bratton two years later, which [unintelligible]. Gurian: I think at one point in the book you have someone just very casually referring to Giuliani as like Giuliani being crazy before he was really crazy, but saying that [unintelligble].
Go ahead. Moskos: Oh. Just, you know, yeah. He said he was, yeah, it was just, this was when he was just crazy before he went crazy, crazy. But he was the right mayor for the time. And a lot of people said that, you know, liberals and conservatives alike, and Democrats. I always think it’s a fun little fact that when Giuliani ran for reelection against Ruth Messenger that the New York Times enthusiastically endorsed Giuliani and said, I mean, of course the city is getting better and the Democratic opponent is asking us not to believe our lying eyes. They’re still sort of in denial. Because, you know, yes, they were reducing crime and saving lives and making the city more pleasant, but they weren’t doing it the right way ‘cause they hadn’t addressed the root causes and social programs — funding for social programs were being slashed and poverty went up that decade in New York City. Which, you know, so I mean, those are bad in and of themselves, but apparently you don’t need to fix those other things to save lives and reduce crime. Gurian: So what kind of questions, as Comstat developed, and there were these — was it weekly or biweekly — t wice weekly meetings.
Moskos: Comstat’s a fascinating story. And when I did start the research, the first interview by the way, was 11 years ago, was a long process. This is my field. I live here. I get a basic understanding, but I was still wondering, like, okay, how do weekly crime meetings stop people from shooting each other? At some point there’s this black box of there, there are lots of intervening variables between the top and the street. And that is what I didn’t know or understand going into this. What Comstat did, and it’s misunderstood by a lot of people. You know, Jack Maple has a great line about how he actually doesn’t even like computers. You know, computers break. Shakespeare didn’t need a word processor, he says, to write his stuff. This could all be done analog and with pin maps and so on. But it wowed people. I mean, the technology was so primitive. It was basically a spreadsheet, a batch file. And it was projected. It just moved, it moved the NYPD from overhead projector to video display. But that had a certain wow factor back in 1994. But what it did, it is it brought people together in the same room, and that hadn’t been done before. So it allowed for, and you know, it, it clearly showed what the management priorities were and, you know, the meetings were harsh and people lost their careers over, and had to retire. But it allowed a transfer of information so people saw what was going on. It broke through the chain of command and the rank structure. So it wasn’t, you know, the chief speaking to deputy chiefs going down to inspector and deputy inspector finally. And then you get a captain, maybe who’s a precinct commander, and lieutenant sergeant, police officer. You brought in a lot of those different ranks and to get them on board so that, to make sure that the information was getting transmitted more directly but also shared within the police department and with other agencies ‘cause collaboration with other agencies certainly is an important part of the picture as well. Gurian: Yeah, I guess I was maybe now I take the introduction of data far too easily when it was a big struggle to do. But what was more impressive was how the data were used. That is it wasn’t just everybody saying, “Oh my, this is how we did last week.” It seemed like it really facilitated a lot of “why” questions.
Moskos: Yeah. And some of that was data-related in the sense, Moskos: and in that sense, computers do help a bit ‘cause of, it’s hard to see . . . if you just have an old fashioned pin map where you put pins, where the crimes are, it’s hard to break that down by time of day, things like that. But you do see the geographic clusters and so like, well, why don’t we put police where the crime is happening? And if we can know when the crime is happening, then we can put police there at that time. So that part, you know, in some ways now we sort of just call that hotspot policing. You don’t need Comstat for that, but Comstat really facilitated it. But what also people said, you know, it’s not so much the details of what went on though, those are important. Everyone said it was just an accountability mechanism that, and that was new. This idea that, okay, this is, you are in charge of your precinct you have this many, whatever the problem is: auto thefts, robberies, shootings, something else. Truancy even. Next week we want to see a plan. And if you don’t have a plan, then you’re not gonna be precinct commander. And if your plan doesn’t work, that’s okay. As long as you have a plan B. And we will, you tell us what you need to get it done. But we need you to fix these problems. It’s a, you know, problem solving Moskos: exercise, and that accountability could have been done in other ways. You can get accountability in a lot of different ways, but this was done through these sort of aggressive high pressure meetings of a hundred people packed into a room that doesn’t quite fit ‘em all. Gurian: And it, just to underline the point not the data on the computer part, but accountability could have been built in, in other ways for decades before that. So, it’s odd. It’s odd that there from a certain perspective that it would’ve taken so long to have accountability built in. Moskos: Yeah. And I think it’s the shift that happened was previously the police department was judged by its failures. And so as long as you could avoid those failures and specifically those issues of corruption, brutality, and riots, that was fine. You keep your head low and if you don’t work, you can’t get in trouble. As a police maxim, that has some truth to it. Nobody was holding their feet to the fire about crime. And I think most cops always believed they could prevent crime, but the politicians weren’t behind it. And these, you know, lessons very applicable to today. You know, I just saw the Chicago mayor avoid the question of, you know, if you could have federally funded 5,000 cops with that reduced crime, and he refused to answer it four times. It’s a progressive shibboleth that these things, that police don’t. Matter. Except in a negative sense. And it, I mean, at some level it’s patently absurd. But you need the leadership. But to say, okay, this is, this is the new game and we’re gonna, and you know, I mean, the other thing is it wasn’t that the policing was flawless. I mean, problems do happen. So that’s when the political, that’s where the rubber meets the road with the political support. Are you gonna throw people under the bus? Well, if they intentionally did something bad, yeah, absolutely. But sometimes mistakes are made and sometimes shit happens. And, and in that sense, you have to say, okay, you know, this, this didn’t turn out well, but, you know, but he, but here, you know, here here’s the accountability we have and here’s how we’re gonna try and prevent it from happening again. So that, that all, I mean, yeah, it’s a complicated it’s a complicated process. You, Brent describes it as, as with a, which I like the analogy as a baseball fan, but it’s like being in a batting cage with all the pitching machines throwing at you at the same time. He thrived on that. I would, you know, I might not. Gurian: There’s a couple of principal ways that people in your book describe broken windows policing. I think from the progressive corner, it has typically been described as over-policing and racially tainted policing. But I wanted to get you to describe the, from the people who were supporting it, some focus on
broken windows as in the quality of life sense. You have Gretchen Dykstra saying there’s a tendency to romanticize the gutter and I don’t think that there’s any upside to that. And then others who are talking about it being a tool so that you’re able to investigate individuals and have some leverage that you can use. So, that it’s both, I take it or the idea was that it would be both. Moskos: Well, I think the idea is that they’re intrinsically linked and that idea might be wrong. I don’t think necessarily that taking care of the little things means the big things will take care of themselves. And that’s how often broken windows is defined you know, by police officers and others. I, there’s, there is a lot of nuance to it. Let me sort of start at the end and then get back to what broken windows is. Broken windows wasn’t, this approach was unpopular at the time when they started. It was seen as too aggressive. The sort of anti-policing crowd jumped on it from the start. And I mean, to some extent I think the anti-policing crowd is more afraid of good policing than bad policing. If your goal is to get rid of policing or diminish it, good policing doesn’t really help your argument. But then it morphed, and this is not, this is past the timeframe of Back from the Brink. I had to have a hard end before September 11, 2001 because you know, partly for length, but in an oral history, you can’t just say, oh, and then that happened and move on. So it ends in the late nineties. What happened in the two thousands was the stop-question-and-frisk debacle. And it gave a bad connotation to broken windows, but it wasn’t broken windows and George Kelling and Bill Bratton were going blue in the face saying, “This is not broken windows. What’s going on here?” It’s a zero tolerance form. It’s the tail wagging the dog in a sense police are being judged on producing these stats, which have some human consequence. It’s not pleasant to be stopped by cops. I mean, sorry. Sometimes it’s more pleasant than others, but it’s an inherently aggressive form of policing. And it went outta control. It wasn’t having a great impact on crime and it’s set policing back decades. I don’t think we’ve recovered from this, from the era of, you know, 2004 to roughly 2012 when cops were stopping hundreds of thousands of people, and primarily for the purpose of stopping them. That’s the thing. Not for the purpose of crime reduction. I mean, that was in a way, part of the goal, but they were just judged on the numbers of stops. I don’t know. So broken windows became to some extent a toxic term. And I don’t know if it can be reclaimed or simply renamed. I mean, we’re always gonna have quality-of-life policing as a concept. Gurian: I think one of the people you spoke to in the book might suggest “tactical quality-of-life measures” since “tactical” seems to be popular. But let’s just stop there for a minute because I think it’s a very, very important point that you were that you’re making. And so let me just really, it’s asking you to repeat it, but you’re saying that broken windows policing as it was applied in the 1990s looked very different from the stop and ffr, the massive stop and frisk period? Moskos: Yeah, absolutely. And, and there are fundamental differences ‘cause broken windows involves police discretion, broken windows is focused on specific problems. The irony with stop-question-and-frisk is that it only became a measure of police productivity when they started keeping accurate account of it. And that was because of a lawsuit from the NYCLU and presumably others. So we only have real numbers of some legitimacy from 2002 on. And it quickly went from a hundred thousand and then six or seven years later, suddenly we’re at more than half a million. And then they ended by 2014 because of a lawsuit. And crime continued to drop by the way, when those stops stop. So we know that that wasn’t the function of these stops. Broken windows. I mean, it comes from a Atlantic magazine article by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling from 1982. And I took a class from Kelling at Harvard when I was in grad school. And he said, and I was also probably, I think I was the last person to interview him before he passed away for the book. And he said, look, if we had known the traction of like what this article how it would have legs and last so long, we might have written it a little differently or maybe used a different term. Maybe that’s a bad term to use. I mean, they’re just writing a magazine article. They didn’t think it would sort of change the world and be interpreted and misinterpreted and so on. And I find one of the, so there are a couple ways you can define it. And the first Dan Biederman, who was responsible for fixing up Bryantt Park and still runs that organization, the Business Improvement District. I gave a talk at Bryant Park two weeks ago and it was great to talk about Bryant Park in Bryantt Park with Dan Biederman in attendance. But he used, very much used, a broken windows approach explicitly. And the result today is that there is less police presence in the park than there was in the eighties, and there is almost no crime. It’s, you know, it’s win-win. That’s the ideal scenario is how it was used there. And he understood it. And he also, I mean, there were other things of course going on. It wasn’t just broken windows, it was urban design and using William White’s theories on urban life and so on. But it was very effective. For that park. But then if you look at subway graffiti that I mentioned earlier, the Transit Authority got rid of subway graffiti in five years, in the late eighties. It’s a case study I love because I don’t know, it was subway graffiti was kind of cool. And it was also one of those things supposedly that would they, we couldn’t do anything about. And they did. And I don’t have to get into exactly how, but my point is, when subway graffiti was eliminated, robberies did not go down on the subway. So that idea that, oh, if we make the subways clean and increase the perception of public safety and somebody’s in control, that crime will take care of itself. No, it didn’t. So that’s, you know, at that level of the theory, broken windows didn’t, doesn’t work. But I would still say it was still a good thing to do for its own sake. The quality of life matters simply for quality of life. And so in that sense, it’s part of broken windows, but the link to reducing serious crime is that — and John Miller describes this very well — it allowed police a legal reason to be in contact with violent offenders before they committed violent crimes. And what did reduce crime on the subway was going after turnstile jumping and Gurian: Which has a lot of resonance for today, yes? Moskos: Yeah. And you know, just because it worked, it might not be the appropriate solution today. Like things change, you have to figure it out. So you wouldn’t want — the point wasn’t just to crack down on turnstile jumping — the point was to catch robbers. Now that means non- robbers, most people who jumped to turnstile weren’t robbers, but okay, you still should pay your fare, so that wasn’t so bad. And if you didn’t have an open warrant, if you didn’t have contraband on you, you know, you were given it a ticket and released. It, you’d be, you know, you’d be processed. It would take an hour or two. But that was it. But what they found is a lot of people did have open warrants and they went to these subway stops where they knew from crime mapping that a lot of the robbers lived. Basically, they were commuting to work to rob people on the subway. And they knew that it was heavily, disproportionately from five or six subway stops in Brooklyn where a lot of these robbers were getting on. So they focused on those stations. And when they started doing that, felony crime dropped immediately on the subway. I mean, they were surprised how quickly the word got out: pressure’s on. People took their crime elsewhere, apparently. And it’s a great natural experiment because robberies did not go down above ground. And you know, so if you have New York City where we have different trends in the subway and on the street the only logical conclusion is, well, let’s see what’s going on in the subway that caused this change. And that was you know, a form of broken windows policing, but very different than than making a park nicer. Because it was the idea what we are gonna catch these people. And then — and this is where Jack Maple was just relentless — we’re going to talk, we’re gonna interrogate them. If you’re stealing subway tokens, where are you selling them? Which bodega? Well, let’s go after them. It was no longer the idea that, okay, we got someone in cuffs, we’ve done our job. It was really trying to break up a whole criminal enterprise. If you’re doing, if you’re caught with a gun, I wanna know who your crew is and let’s go talk to them as well if we can. And maybe we can legally stop them because they’re on the corner with an open container. So it was very selective. It was very, a lot of the, you know, very pretextual, a lot of these stops. And inevitably you know, there were racial disparities compared to the city population. But they were focused on crime and the racial disparities, you know, everywhere in America, including on crime perpetrators and usually crime victims as well.
Gurian: Right. So just to, just to slow that down and clear it up you’re saying that it’s an incorrect comparison to look at the city’s population as a whole, what you’d need to be doing in terms of the stops, in ter in terms of people who were stopped in connection with the evasion or things like that, is to look at the demographics of those committing crimes and those who were victims of crimes.
Moskos: Yeah. Former police commissioner Benjamin Ward got in trouble when he talked about to a group of black journalists and he brought up the issue of racial disparities in offenders, and he called it “our dirty little secret.” He got a lot of pushback for that because it wasn’t polite to talk about, but the offenders were vastly, disproportionately Black or Hispanic. And, you know, and to some extent we still don’t have a way to talk about that today in 2025, though, I think the discussion in that sense has gotten a little better. But even today, you know, 95 percent of shooting victims, and therefore we can assume shooters, more than 95 percent are Black or Hispanic. And you see that in New York. You see that in Chicago. And so I don’t know how we, you know, if you’re, if you’re gonna reduce shootings, you are gonna disproportionately impact Black or Hispanic individuals. And, you know, and mistakes are made. People will be, innocent people will be stopped. There is some collateral damage. So at that, you know, you have to minimize that, and you have to be transparent about it. But there’s no way you can reduce urban violence in America in a way that, you know, that treats criminality as not having a correlation with, with race. Gurian: And this is one of many taboos in New York City: having an open discussion of this that does not devolve into crude charges and counter charges. Moskos: And, you know, I understand why people like, ‘cause I do try and talk about it. And then suddenly, you know, racists wanna be your friend and they, you know, they use that and, and I mean, just it’s work and it’s tiring and I don’t want racists to use it in a racist way. But I also want the left to use it in an honest way. And not, I mean, you, you still see a time and time again where people say, oh, this, you know, these stops or whatever are, are racist because of the racial disparities? Well, when it, yeah, when it comes to illegal guns, there are racial disparities. I mean, now you have this weird, you know, horseshoe effect between the far left and the far right, saying that gun control is bad. The far left saying that it’s racist because gun control efforts disproportionately impact, you know, Black and Hispanic New Yorkers. I don’t know what, you know, we’re doomed if we can’t enforce gun laws in our cities. Gurian: I wanted to ask you a specific question about gun laws, but first how does one, if one’s running the New York City Police Department, and recognizing that some effective crime fighting measures do have collateral damage, what do you do concretely to in fact try to minimize that collateral damage, recognizing that you can’t get down to zero. Moskos: Yeah. You do have to be open about it. You do have to have accountability. A lot of the focus has to be on training sergeants, because those are the frontline supervisors. And as you know, a good sergeant can make the difference between a unit being effective and also damaging, versus effective and, you know, good for the community. I have found consistently that it’s amazing, especially in high crime communities, how much leeway police are given even with certain opposition to policing, in sort of a hierarchy of needs concept. Public safety trumps so much, and if police are effective at reducing violence and people are no longer afraid to walk down the street, I mean, and they’ll cut police a lot of slack. And so that’s a way to increase, you know, increase police legitimacy in one terms or just you have to be effective. You have to be, you know, tactics have, this is, I I love this is Lou Anemone’s, three pronged… he would judge every policy by, is it moral, is it legal, is it effective? And if you do all that it’s, you know, it’s gonna work and the public will support you and understand sometimes that you know, a brief stop by cops as if the cops are polite is not the end of the world. Because I do want them to be active in their policing, you know, policing as a verb.
Gurian: If we go back to the eighties, I could swear I could, and of course. It’s 40 years ago, so I could be wrong, but I thought there was a provision of what was then a criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree which rendered simple possession of a loaded firearm outside the home or place of business a felony offense, typically with a minimum sentence of one to three years. Am I misremembering that? And second, that’s changed. I mean, if I’m not mis-remembering it, that the law on that has changed.
Moskos: I don’t know. But I do know how it was applied and how that did change. And I learned this from my students. I started teaching at John Jay College in 2004. And, right or wrong — I think they were right — but in a way it’s irrelevant whether they were right or wrong. And they said, oh yeah, if you get caught with a gun, you’re gonna do time. Period. There there’s no, it’s a bad analogy to say no silver bullet solution, we’re talking about guns, but there’s no silver bullet solution. But that is the single probably best way to reduce gun violence. Because if you can get people to not carry the gun on them, and that includes so-called, I’m just, you know, people who aren’t committing crime, but they want it, you know, for protection. Well, I don’t want you to have it for protection because some of that protection means you might shoot somebody. And so if you just keep that illegal gun you have not physically on your person, even if it’s somewhat nearby … so much of the gun violence… these aren’t by and large premeditated assassinations. That sometimes happens, but they’re disputes, they’re fights, and if you have the gun, you can use it. And if you don’t have the gun right there right then, you can’t use it. So was a football player who shot himself in the, in a club and did time that probably had more impact on, you know, getting the word out and reducing violence than any other thing. I don’t think that law has changed. I don’t know. But it requires a commitment and dedication to keep focusing on these issues. And you know, at some point people just go, well, you know, this isn’t a bad kid, so we’re not gonna jail him which might be good for the kid. It might be in a sense, the right thing, but then suddenly you lose the deterrent effect of people saying, “Oh, I got arrested with a gun and I did get away with it.” And I, so that is, I think, what is, what has changed just to some extent. Gurian: I believe it’s the case, and someone out there should correct me if I’m wrong, that simple possession now is a misdemeanor offense and not a felony offense. Another area where it seems to be very difficult to have nuanced discussions is just in terms of some of the basic information on, you know, crime down and crime up. And so I looked at change in in the period of 2000. So that’s long after the reduction started. From 2000 to 2024, and murders were down 43 percent.
In the constricted sort of COVID period, they were up 19 percent and change. And then in 2025 year to date, versus 2024 year to date, which I did a little earlier in the summer, they were back down from, in 25, about 25 percent. But one of the real outliers appears to be felony assault. So, you know, it’s great that murder’s down, but felony assaults, which hadn’t dropped in that period skyrocketed by over 40 percent in the period from 2019 to 2024. And this year appeared to be basically flat. What’s going on with that? Why that, I mean, because it really it really stands out that, you know, the, the data aren’t fantastic in terms of rape, but this is… Moskos: Yeah, this is really bad. This is why I try and not use other crime stats other than murders and shootings. I don’t think this is the entire argument, but I think it’s a huge part of it: body cams rolled out in 2019 to the NYPD. And I looked into this because in the neighborhood of Corona, I think it’s the 112, I could be wrong, I noticed, you know, you get those Comstat numbers and it goes back to 1993 and murders were, you know, down whatever they were. I mean, they were up that year in 2020, but they were down 80 percent, you know, historically, and aggravated assaults at some point actually were larger. And I said ” that can’t be, there cannot be more assaults in 20, whatever the a year was a few years ago, than there were in 1993.” Just, you know, no it’s not the case. So I asked some cops who worked there and and they said, yeah, in the old days if there was a bar fight you would tell them to go home or you’d arrest them for disorderly conduct, but it was an aggravated assault. And so now with body cams, you can’t downgrade those crimes. So there’s much more accurate reporting and I mean, I think aggravated assaults did increase, but not nearly to the extent that the numbers would indicate. Gurian: That’s very interesting. And I don’t have the raw numbers in front of me, but that’s still an awful lot of felony assaults. Even granted that some component of them are bar fights and things that would not have been charged in the past. Why haven’t there been more reductions, I guess is my question? Moskos: So recently, of course, I mean, yeah, so violence peaked after the George Floyd unrest during COVID in 2020. The criminal justice system basically came to a screeching halt, and I think we’re finally recovering from that. So I’m looking now at the actual data. Year to date felony assaults are, are constant in 2025. Which is interesting because I would expect it to be more correlated with shootings going down 20 percent, because if nothing else shootings are felony assaults, of course, they’re far fewer shootings. Maybe people, you know, maybe COVID did break a lot of people and there are more felony assaults. Maybe it’s because things aren’t being prosecuted, so people know they, you know, the consequences are less. There are lots of explanations, but I just, I can’t get over my skepticism of the reported numbers. So I don’t know. Gurian: Fair enough. I’m going to want to give you a heads up: in a little while, i’d like to know some key questions you’d like to ask our almost-certain next mayor Zohran Mamdani, who’s spoken a lot about what the police department shouldn’t be doing. But it’s certainly not the first time that what should be in the department’s purview has come up. I think it was Ray, maybe it’s Ray Kelly who you quote as saying, we did a lot of load shedding in the Dinkins administration,
I think pointing to not sending a police car to every fire. It was a pretty good quote. You know, they have big red trucks that are, that are able to block off the street. And Charles Campisi, if I’m saying is name right… Moskos: You are. Gurian: Bratton forms re-engineering teams. He wants you to justify what the f your unit is doing and why you should keep doing it. So,
how should one think about it if you’re going in with an open mind and saying, “Surely there are functions for the police, and surely the police can’t be expected to take on every social ill. How do you strike that balance? How do you think about striking that balance?”
Moskos: Police do have to deal with every social… In reality it’s at least when other organizations have failed, police are the only people from the government who will come when called and who are working nights and weekends. Now some, a lot of this in the ideal world should be other organizations.
The problem is the shift to that is often driven ideologically by people who are opposed to policing. We will know the second, like I, cops would love not to have to deal with mental illness and homelessness and many things. Okay. So, you know, but as soon as people, as soon as cops don’t have to deal with it, then, then, you know, then we can start talking about shifting resources and so on. But look, my own professional interest is police focused. So, let society set up those things and I’m willing to pay more, you know, more taxes to do that if it works. But you have to, we know exactly when police aren’t needed is when call numbers go down. And until that happens, police are needed. And some of that you saw when police in New York stopped, you know, enforcing certain issues. And, you know, vending authority was taken away from the NYPD. Police were no longer permitted to go into places where loud parties were happening. So complaints for those issues then increased. So then police have to deal with that. The policies not just didn’t work, they were actually counterproductive. So look, the best case scenario is we do have better mental health systems. You know, once someone calls, if someone’s in crisis and you have to call 911, in a way, that’s too… I don’t care who responds. Maybe, maybe social workers might do a nominally better job, but actually police do a pretty good job with that. They are trained in that, maybe not as extensively as social workers, but they are trained and they handle hundreds of thousands of calls. And in the vast, vast majority, nobody gets hurt. Okay. If we don’t want police to handle that, that’s fine, but police are still gonna have to handle the difficult ones ‘cause social workers aren’t gonna go confront an armed person. We have to fix that problem before people are in crisis. And I don’t know how we do that. but if we just wanna talk about who responds I don’t know. Cops are already on the job, you know. Some of it is financial. We could set up a parallel system and maybe it would be more effective. I just, I think a lot of the people who push for that though are a bit disingenuous. And sometimes it’s not also about a mentally ill, homeless person. It shouldn’t only be about what’s best for them. What also matters is the rest of us. Maybe that person does want to live on the subway, but I’m willing to say you can’t. I mean, them’s the rules. Now I, I would also argue that is better for a homeless, mentally ill person. Just yesterday I was looking at the number of people killed in the subway system by trains. And it increased dramatically in 2017 when police stopped enforcing loitering rules on the subway in the name of compassion. More people die. And the vast majority of people killed by trains are homeless people on the tracks and not people pushed or other things. Yeah. So the idea that, oh, they choose to decline, go to shelter, well, okay, but you can’t stay here. I mean, and that of course was going back to the earlier era in 1991 when Bratton was transit chief. That was a huge push, was to, I mean, I don’t, you probably remember the stories about the Mole people living in what’s now the Amtrak track on the west side there. Gurian: Yes. Moskos: Yeah, it was, and you know, I, of course it’s good for people to, you know, yes, it’s a tough transition. But a lot of people are not in a condition to make a rational choice. And even those that are, you can still say, well, you know, you gotta follow the rules. That was a huge victory in 1991. And I also talk about a related thing in Port Authority bus terminal. It was related in the fact that they addressed these issues. It wasn’t the same people doing it. These were huge victories. And then we sort of forgot under de Blasio that we just sort of gave up a lot of those rules by mayoral fiat. And it was kind of sad to see decades of hard work just sort of say, okay, now we’re not gonna do that anymore. And you know, murders on the subway are still rare, but it was zero and then it increased to 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12. It, you know, it goes up and up. And it’s not just those, you know, dozen or so victims. It’s the, you know, the crazy people that you’re afraid of. But here we are, and I think I’m, I we do, I worry what’s gonna happen assuming that Mamdani is elected.
Gurian: So before we get to your questions for him. I still want to try to get a little bit more clarity from you. Has the police department during the Adams mayoralty been
looking at any re-engineering?
And to me that sounds like that should be a dynamic, never-ending process, because what may work in one moment may not work in another moment. And there, there are not infinite resources. So, you know, how do you determine what head count should be? How do you determine how to deploy those resources? Moskos: Luckily there are a lot, I think, surprising a lot of really smart people in the NYPD some of whom I know, some of whom have been my students. And in a large organization, you know, they’re running things to some extent. And then they’re doing a good job of it. The problem is that Adams brought in a cadre of corrupt cronies. And for the first time in 30 years, we had corruption at the top levels of the police department. It’s worth pointing out that back in Bratton’s focus on order, maintenance and preventing crime, corruption also went down. There hadn’t been a big — there used to be a scandal, a big scandal every 10 years was the rule of thumb. And from like the Dirty 30 and the Buddy Boys… And I mean, when I was researching this book again — ‘cause I wasn’t living in New York at the time — people would talk about these things. I’m, and I’m thinking, wait, is that, are you talking about the Dirty 30? Oh no, that’s another precinct that had this problem. And there’s just so many of these things and there were huge and horrible. And it wasn’t always just individual bad apples. So it’s worth pointing out that like the NYPD and again, you know, cops are fired every year; it’s not that there aren’t problems. But there hasn’t been a big corruption scandal until now. We see this at the top. And how do you tell a cop on the street to play by the rules when the police commissioner isn’t? And the whole thing is crooked on the top. So that’s been a terrible development. Now with Jessica Tisch has gotten a lot better. That was she, because of her family name and wealth, you know, she’s not in it for the money. And she to some extent can do the right thing. And apparently, you know, she’s doing a good, she’s a good manager. But, you know, she’s the first commissioner in decades, many decades to not have a police background. I think I don’t say that negatively that might be a plus at this moment. So she’s a little removed from that. But there’s still two people in the, you know, a lot of the Adams corrupt people are no longer in the NYPD, but there’s still two of them that I mean, there are more than two, but two big ones that it’s problematic. And the fact that Tisch hasn’t been able to replace one of them you know, she doesn’t have complete power. She serves at the whim of the mayor. So there’s certain lines that obviously have been drawn. Gurian: It may seem as we’re recording this today that everyone will know the names, but say them if you would. Moskos: I prefer not to say them. I don’t want to get you know, I don’t wanna take on the Adams administration. They’re, they’re out there. They’re, you know, you can listen to the NYPD Unfiltered podcasts. They talk about ‘em all the time. But I don’t know. I’m not there. But like, what I do know, I can talk about some that are out now out of the police department. I mean… Gurian: Let’s not go there, and let’s think about the next mayoralty. And,
you know, one of, one of the things that just as a lifelong New Yorker seems like it has to be — you know, sometimes when you say it has to be it isn’t — but there need to be best practices somewhere out there in the United States or elsewhere about like when you engage in a chase
in including a vehicular case, and when you don’t do that. Are those best practices already in place and they’re just not widely publicized? Do I need to read more or does the department need to do more? Moskos: The vehicular chase is, it’s a tough one. I wrote an article years ago for the West Side Spirit or some local newspaper on the West Side saying cops should never chase. And I could make that argument. I did make that argument that the risks simply aren’t worth it. But if cops do never chase, then suddenly you’re saying that you can’t pull over a criminal — it makes all cars stops voluntary. All you have to do is drive away. So you need some threat of chase, some deterrence. But you really, I mean, they are dangerous, and innocent people die. Now mind you, innocent people die if you don’t enforce traffic laws either when police aren’t involved. So it’s easy to say, you know, this many people died because of a police chase. You know, those people wouldn’t have died. But it is a little too cold calculus to me to say, well, you know, fewer people die. It’s better this way. It’s horrible. Any individual chase is probably not worth it. But you do need to have, but you can’t, you don’t want it to be zero. You saw this in Chicago, not only ban vehicular chases but but foot pursuits by and large, de facto.
. . and carjackings, you know, went up. You constantly have to adjust. I mean, the other, and cops will chase if they can because it’s fun. It’s what you get an adrenaline rush. So you do need that supervision, that accountability, and but it can’t be zero. At some point if you’re pulling over someone who, you know, you think is a murderer, you can’t just let ‘em drive away. Gurian: In current practice, is there real-time supervisory communication?
Moskos: Yes. By and large. Okay. I mean, there should be, and there usually is. Yeah. I mean, partly ‘cause of policy you have to announce it. Of course your supervisor’s not there. But, you know, you have to explain what the person is wanted for, you know, why you’re trying to do this. But at some point, if they’re just start driving too fast, you get, I mean, you do have to let ‘em go. But hopefully you know, hopefully they won’t drive away in the first place. But it’s really one of the toughest things. I mean, especially if you’ve got a car, like a car with no license plate, you just let ‘em go? I mean, ugh, that’s exactly the person you want. Stop someone who’s got tinted windows and no license plate. So then you can try and box ‘em in. And they’re very, you know, they’re various tactics, but in, at, you know, the moment. To moment situation. It’s not, it’s rarely the ideal situation that you have. Gurian: Let me ask you a couple of questions about police misconduct. Not in the massive corruption scandal sense. And one of them, you know, appears to be a routine day-to-day thing which I think people refer to in shorthand as placard abuse.
Why hasn’t that been stamped out?
Moskos: Because city officials, teachers, doctors, reverends abuse the system and they don’t want it to be stamped out. It’s not just cops. Gurian: I wasn’t suggesting that, but, you know, everything else, you know, now going back to the lessons from your book says that are, there are messages that are sent within the department and there are messages that are sent to the public. And this is not to justify doctors or any of the other groups that you’ve spoken about, but when police officers are doing that, that does.. Moskos: It’s a bad look. Yeah. Now Bloomberg cracked down on this, and we were, it seemed on the verge of kind of ending parking, placard abuse, corruption and then de Blasio gave out all the placards again. I mean, you know, the battle had been won and once again the de Blasio like, no, I wanna, ‘cause he, you know, I don’t know. He is probably getting campaign donations for it. I mean, I think it’s straight up quid pro quo at times. With the police, , here’s the problem. Cops are going to drive to work and often they have to, because they’re required to carry, have access to certain equipment and so on, they have to get to court. That could be far away after work. And public transportation isn’t good enough to get to, you know, the Queens County courthouse. I don’t have a car. I would love it if nobody had a car in New York City, but cops are going to drive to work. So now what do we do about that? Very few people know that there’s actually a contractual obligation to provide parking for cops at the police station for their personal car. It’s phrased in a way that said the city should, it’s not a shall in the legal terms, but it’s in the contract. And now the city doesn’t. But, so there actually is, cops are supposed to be able to park their car at work in the contract.
At some point, I would say make it legal then. Take away public parking from the people that have cars. I mean, that’s the political opposition is people wanna park their car. And just say, okay, you can, yes, this is police parking only on the street. And now we’ve simply legalized what has been happening before. It is a bad look to see cops parked everywhere illegally. Gurian: Including bike lanes. Moskos: Including bike lanes. You know, that’s a departmental, I mean, at some point that has to come internally. The police department is very car focused and you know, as again, a non-car owner that bugs me. Though I do find a little bit, there’s some people that like, think the biggest problem in New York City is where cops park and I kind of just wanna go. I mean, I agree with them at some level, but like, get a life. My God, they’re 99 problems. Maybe that’s one of ‘em, but it’s certainly in the, not the top 80 of the city. But it does in that broken window sense, it, it, you know, does sort of create a mentality of impunity and of public disorder. But there, yeah, the problem, I mean, people in power don’t want to stop it. That’s so continues. Gurian: The other thing which I think you’d agree is higher on the level of importance than placard abuse is abuse of citizens, when that occurs. And do you have a view as to how you have
effective oversight mechanisms that at the same time are not punishing cops for legitimate, even if erroneous, decisions made in that they have to make in the moment?
Moskos: I mean, most of that stuff now, you know, we have pretty good evidence now because of body cams. So it’s not just a “he said, she said” kind of situation. We can actually see it. It’s, I mean, maybe it works , maybe I’m being too cynical here. In some ways ,we have the worst of both worlds where we have a citizen review board that is, overly aggressive and doesn’t understand the cop perspective. And then, punishment is ultimately done internally in the police department. I think in the better world you’d have an oversight board that includes the police department, that actually has teeth and can punish cops when they behave incorrectly. Like in terms of constitutional issues, the Supreme Court says that police action should be judged by a reasonable police officer at the scene and not with 2020 hindsight. And instead we do it with 2020 hindsight. If the system… The cops love it when bad cops get punished. Cops don’t like working with bad cops. They try and stay far away. So. If you could have a system, and it’s a big “if,” where the guilty got punished and the innocent were not besmirched, cops would support it wholeheartedly. Part of the problem with civilian boards in many cities, you know, like, because I was a cop 24 years ago, I’m forbidden from serving on a lot of these boards. I mean, imagine having a doctor oversight board where anyone who went to med school is prohibited from serving on that oversight board. Because you might say, I don’t understand why the cop did that. And I could say, well, ‘cause you don’t see the threat. But I do, because I’ve been there, because I’ve trained on it because I can articulate what’s going on. The fact that you’re ignorant about it does not mean the cop was wrong. So, that’s the type of knowledge you want on a board is people who, you know, know what they’re talking about, quite frankly. I would also, I mean, the number of cops that are fired, I don’t know what it is off the top of my head. It’s a lot more than people think. It’s often domestic issues, it’s often off-duty stuff. But the on-duty stuff you know, it’s tough to take a gun off a person. And any physical force looks ugly. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The other problem, you know, tools have been taken away. I was a big fan of the, something as simple as the police baton, the night stick. Now I see cops basically getting in the slapping fights with people at protests and so on. Like, you need to keep some distance. But tools have been taken away and then cops are sort of blamed for being ineffective. But at some point, cops can’t lose fights. And hopefully that attitude prevents them from happening. But in terms of cops who are abusive, I mean, you have to also look at, right now there’s a system where if you get x number of complaints you’re put on a watch list. Well, if you’re on an active unit taking guns off the street, you’re gonna get more complaints. If you’re working in police headquarters, you’re not. So you have to take it, it should take that. The denominator’s not right. You have to see which cops are out there working. Now, if you are in the same squad with somebody and you have three times the number of complaints, that’s a huge red flag. That’s where I start going, yeah, maybe you are the problem. But these things always try and get sort of quantified and to avoid lawsuits, you don’t wanna, you know, it’s, it’s much easier to say five complaints and you’re on a watch list rather than let’s figure out what’s going on. ‘Cause sometimes it is a matter of training. Sometimes the cop just doesn’t realize like, you know, you could handle this better. And sometimes it’s that cop is an evil person hurting people. And you have to be able to make those distinctions. Does the NYPD do a good job on that? It’s hard, you know, compared to what? Certainly I’d say compared to many departments, they do. But no, it’s certainly not perfect. But again, I would say, you know, the best way to avoid it is focus on sergeants. They should be controlling their squad and setting examples. That that’s how you prevent a lot of this from happening is having a good sergeant and a unit that is not totally isolated from other police units.
Gurian: And ultimate question — I didn’t know about the should have parking part of the contract…. Moskos: I didn’t know that until a couple years ago. Gurian: But certainly a third rail as, as far as, I think, a lot of police officers and their union would be concerned has to do with residency in New York City. Do you think that the lack of a residency requirement is a problem or no? Moskos: It can be. There’s the ideal world and the the world we have. If a city can impose a residency requirement, I’m for it. Not just for policing reasons, just, you know, to keep the tax base in the city. About half the cops do live in the city and a significant chunk more has lived in the city. Yeah, I think there’s a perception that all these cops are all coming from Long Island and many do. But still it’s about half who live in the city. I think there’s a benefit to having lived in the city just to understand the way urban life functions. To have a stake. Now you can learn that if you’re not from the city, but some people don’t learn it. It might take a certain amount of time to learn that. The downside is recruitment. I also, I understand why cops want to leave the city, because you don’t want to be on duty 24/7. You don’t want to be going to a movie with your family and seeing the guy and hearing the words. I know you from somebody you arrested that, you know, that you may or may not remember. And to some extent the police department is happy to not have cops get involved in off-duty stuff. But recruitment, you know, there is a recruiting crisis and we’re lowering standards. If you have a residency requirement, you know, you’re just restricting that pool even more. I would also say, you know, New York is, does not have a lot of cheap vacant housing. Gurian: I’ve noticed. Moskos: I mean cities that do have a residency requirement like Boston or Chicago, you know, you get cop neighborhoods like we have here in the Bronx and Staten Island. Is that, you know, does it matter if they’re living in Jefferson Park, a neighborhood in Chicago, rather than just outside the city limits? Well, again, for tax reasons, I say, yeah, it’s better that way. I want them vested, more vested in the city. But if you live too far, if your commute is more than an hour, like that’s not good for you or the city, then you suddenly your work life is set around that commute. I would prefer to let cops live in New Jersey, nearby New Jersey than, you know, Northern Rockland County, for instance. Or Eastern Suffolk County. So it is sort of bizarre that you can live all the way at the tip of along of Long Island, but you can’t live across the Hudson. And, you know, in Hoboken. But it’s what we got. Gurian: Alright, well, let’s end, if that’s okay, with Assemblyman Mamdani. And I don’t know if you want to share concerns. Obviously you have them or there are questions you have for him or things you want him to rethink. So go ahead. Moskos: Well, I am his constituent. He is my state representative. I have reached out to him a couple times and no one’s gotten back to me, so that’s discouraging.
What worries me is the city I think got worse under de Blasio except for the ferries. I love the ferries and pre-K might be good too, but I don’t have kids. de Blasio was an old fashioned progressive on the left side of the Democratic Party; he understood the crime would be his Achilles heel. He appointed Bill Bratton as commissioner again when he was elected. He made some really bad choices, you know, stop enforcing subway rules, things like that. He certainly, you know, got on the defund bandwagon for a while. But he was in the Overton window of acceptable thought even kind of pushing the edge. What scares me about Mamdani is the DSA ideology is overtly anti-policing.
I mean, anti-jails, anti-prison. At some point in the near future, I think 2027, the law says we have to close Rikers. Right now we can’t. The law I presumed would change; well, maybe that law won’t change and we will simply release half of the population there because we don’t have beds for them or even more. That would be a public safety disaster. ‘Cause there’s no one in Rikers Island for nickel bags of weed or turnstyle jumping. Population’s historically low and they’re violent people there. But if your goal is to end incarceration, you just might do it. Yeah, it’ll be a disaster, but we won’t know that until we do it. The the mayor of New York is kind of a weak mayor, but compared to other cities without too much power. But the mayor does appoint the police commissioner and the Department of Corrections Commissioner and you know what if he appoints my City Council rep who’s a abolitionist as police commissioner. If he wanted to destroy the police department, he could. Now, does he want to? I don’t know. I would like him to address these issues, you know? Now he says he is not into defunding. Okay. Is he just saying that to get elected? I mean, I’m reading the party platform and it’s, you know, revolutionary, peaceful revolutionary, you know, not violent, but it’s revolutionary Marxist claptrap. I don’t, and then he’s part of that party. It’s not just that he’s running under that party ticket. So I don’t know what he believes. I don’t know if he knows, you know, does he think that cops are a problem that we’re supposed to be eliminated as, as soon as it’s politically expedient? But the idea that an abolitionist could be mayor is potentially disastrous ‘cause they could break things and then simply go back to the usual arguments that, oh, they, you know, it’s not because of what we did, it’s because of society and class oppression and white supremacy and all those other things. You could do a lot of harm to a city. But at this point, I guess, you know, I have to hope for the best. Gurian: Before hoping for the best. Are there specific benchmarks you have in mind or specific commitments that he could make that would reduce your level of concern?
Moskos: Yes. He could keep Jessica Tisch as police commissioner as a steady hand on the tiller. He hasn’t said he would do that. He could actually, he said, oh, he’s gone as far as saying something like, oh, police play a critical role in public safety. That’s not enough. Now maybe he doesn’t care about placating me and my fears but I want to hear him talk about what police the role in crime prevention and be serious about it. The conversation always gets shifted to this greater public safety plan. Well, those type of things don’t have a great track record of success. Or I just want him to say, I’m gonna, you know, take a hands off approach. And maybe I’m not gonna increase the headcount, but I’m also not gonna, you know, defund and reduce the headcount, the funding for a lot of organizations, but especially the police department, if you did what would seem like a minor cut — say, if you got 15 percent of the budget and shifted to other things that you claim are gonna work — you gotta lay off cops. You know, it’s 90, 95 percent labor is the, the budget. So it could seem sort of, “Oh, just a 15% cut.” Well, I hope we don’t go back to the era of laying off cops ‘cause like we did in 1975, ‘cause that scarred the police department for a full generation. You know, he said, and then he came, pulled back from, we’re not gonna enforce misdemeanors. Well, I mean, I don’t know where he stands on it. But punching someone in the face is a misdemeanor. Does he not understand this? I don’t know. It’s the idea of using the subways as social services. We do not want to attract mentally ill and homeless people into the subway; provide those services elsewhere because the subway system matters. That could have a huge negative impact. And to some extent, I’m afraid that they wanna highlight problems ‘cause it fits into their ideology of, of society. I don’t know. I mean, that’s leaving aside the fact he’s inexperienced. And, you know, what’s he ever managed before? And I don’t know, people don’t seem to, I mean, part of the problem, of course is a lot of his opponents are xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist people. But I don’t care how much he can bench press. You know, I was of the recent scandal. I want to press him on his issues, press him on what is, what he, what is how much he, the DSA party platform represents him. I mean, he did in their conference talk about the ultimate goal of seizing the means of production. People are always not really that extreme. I don’t know what you call someone who talks about the ultimate goal being seizing the means of production in a socialist, communist framework. We’ll see. Gurian: Well, in a more specific way, one thing that has seemed to remain quite vague is
what are the components of
the work that police officers signed up to do? Because that, I think, is the way he’s describing the formula and why, and one of the ways that the candidate is trying to sell the idea of the Department of Community Safety. There are a number of things that police officers would prefer not to be dealing with. It’s not clear, I think, what things he does want the police to be dealing with. Moskos: Well, one of the things he says he doesn’t want the police doing, he wants to disband the unit that polices protests. Well, that’s gonna be interesting because pro-Palestinian protests are gonna continue. I mean, there’re, there’s, you know, I think a thousand protests a year in New York City. I mean, it’s not just about that. But if you depolice those protests, I predict they’ll get worse. I mean, worse in the sense of then you’ll get vandalism, violence and so on. There’s gonna be a lot of rubber meeting the road here of what he wants the police to do, but the specific things he could suggest it would be harmful. What do police sign up for? Often they sign up for a job, quite frankly, and then they’ll, you know, and they’ll do, do what they’re told. The, the, what scares me most about the public safety planning he’s presented is it’s a billion dollars a year and it’s basically, it’s half of it’s unfunded. Well, that’s where he might take it from the police department or maybe he’ll only do half of it. I don’t know. The other half is taxing the rich, which, you know, part of me kind of likes as long as they stay in the city. ‘Cause I do wanna be able to tax the rich. But you keep reading these proposals and it all, I mean always like, “Well, this is proven to work.” No it’s not. Other cities have tried these things; often they don’t work. Now I don’t wanna be too cynical about it ‘cause some of those things can work and if they do work, great. Then let’s try and scale if it is scalable, you know, scale it up and implement it and, and claim victory. But we have never, no city in America, and there are lots of really progressive cities have managed to shift a bulk of police resource, you know, police work away from the police department in any productive way. Yeah, a little bit. There’s the cahoots program in Denver, and they handle a few homeless issues. Great, okay. If that’s worth the money, fine. But that’s, again, not they’re dealing with people who aren’t in the, in a horrible crisis or armed. We just don’t seem to learn from other cities. And maybe that is a New York bubble kind of problem we have here. Gurian: Well, that’s a sober note to end on. Moskos: Can I be slightly even more sober? Gurian: Yeah. Moskos: Which is, there’s no good person running against him. I mean, I actually don’t think Adams has been a horrible mayor. If you leave aside the corruption, he is brought into the [unintelliglbe] city, which I don’t think he should, but I think his policies have been okay. I mean, I hate Cuomo. And I think a lot of New Yorkers do. Like, I think he’s, you know, he’s not a good person. And everyone who, I haven’t worked for him, but I know people who are adjacent to that world, and apparently everyone hates him. Well, that doesn’t bode well for setting up a team. And you got Curtis Sliwa. He is Curtis Sliwa. Moskos: I don’t know. You know, his chances are pretty slim. Walden actually I would support, but he’s apparently has no chance. I mean, why can’t we get somebody decent running for office who is sort of a, a centrist in the left Democratic world of New York City. But the choices are horrible. I do see the appeal of Mamdani:, he is charismatic and he’s can’t, he’s acting like he wants it. That matters, you know? Gurian: Well, I guess one of the lessons of your book is that things can get pretty bleak. And they can still be turned around. Now before they’re turn, before they’re turned around the bleakness is not simply a literary description, it’s a statement about what life in New York City is about. I take it you’re pretty convinced that if Mamdani goes in the direction that you think he will, that
the progress that has been made will be lost in a really easily discernible way. And that next time out, so
we’re talking about the 2029 election, there’d be a stronger set of candidates to run against it. Moskos: Yeah. And, and the sequel to my book could be called Back to the Brink for the coming out in 2028. I mean, when the best case scenario is he is just another de Blasio? I mean, that’s not a good situation to be in. But he says de Blasio’s the best mayor of his lifetime. Well, he is only 33, right? So he hasn’t seen that many. But he is also praised Dinkins, who, you know, who comes off quite poorly in my book, but he was kind of a disastrous mayor, even if he was a outstanding individual at a personal level. I mean, he did not, he didn’t make the city better. Gurian: I should just footnote for the audience in terms of your book you do recite the fact or the people you spoke to recited the fact that the initial upturn in police headcount — that is, getting more people into the academy — did occur pursuant to the direction of Dinkins, but the results of that larger force didn’t come into place until Giuliani was there. Moskos: Dinkins came, or it took, you know, a white kid from Utah to be killed on the subway to turn things around. Brian Watkins. And that led to the “Dave Do Something” headline, and Dave did: “Safe Streets, Safe City” he got passed with the help of Peter Valone, Sr. And, you know, hired, yeah. Finally hired a bunch of cops that were needed. He also got… under Dinkins, the Squeegee Men disappeared, which is weird that Bratton and Giuliani got to take credit for that. But that was before them. It was right before them. So, but it took many years for, it took, well two or three years for Dinkins to come around and, you know, he never seemed to really want those cops. I mean, they did come on after he was out and might be Lenny Levitt, I forget who was saying it, but you know, perhaps as the people who worked for him were hoping that he, if he, when Dinkins got reelected, he could kind of shift that money to something else. But that, that didn’t happen. But yeah, I mean, so a lot of that did start, I think, you know, technically the crime drop started in 1990, but it didn’t really swing in with a sort of demise of public, of crack cocaine or the remission or whatever. The decline of it. But it didn’t, those are small decreases, you know, more regression to the mean type thing. It’s when crime fell off the table in 94 and specifically August of 1994, like you can actually pinpoint a month, you know, you can pinpoint cause and effect. But of course naysayers will always say it was just lucky, coincidence or something. Gurian: Well, why don’t we end with the murders? I don’t know if you have the numbers off the top of your head. You’ll probably be close. So what was the peak number? So I’m talking about murders, not shootings. The peak year, and the number and the lowest, which I think may have been actually during the de Blasio administration, maybe 2017 or 18? Moskos: 2017 and 2018 was pretty close. So, it was 2,262 murders in 1990. That one I do know off the top of my head. And then in 2017, it was under 300: 292. And also under 300 in 2018. That was fewer murders than Baltimore City had. Baltimore City has a population of 580,000 people. I mean, it’s a amazing accomplishment to reduce murders by nearly 90 percent. And then we sort of seemed to take it for granted that it was just gonna stay that way. Gurian: Well, it’s a very interesting story that you told in Back to the Brink and I thank you for sharing that with me, and we’ll see how things play out in the next few months till November. And then, from the way you described things, it sounds like we will be finding out pretty early in 2026 how things are going to be public-safety-wise
for this city for the next four years. Moskos: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on. It’s been a very good discussion.