Contemporary Authors

• Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2013
• Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2018

1. Uneasy peace : the great crime decline, the renewal of city life, and the next war on violence LCCN 2017051652 Type of material Book Personal name Sharkey, Patrick, author. Main title Uneasy peace : the great crime decline, the renewal of city life, and the next war on violence / Patrick Sharkey. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2018] Description xxii, 244 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm ISBN 9780393609608 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER HT123 .S535 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Stuck in place : urban neighborhoods and the end of progress toward racial equality LCCN 2012017909 Type of material Book Personal name Sharkey, Patrick. Main title Stuck in place : urban neighborhoods and the end of progress toward racial equality / Patrick Sharkey. Published/Created Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Description x, 250 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9780226924243 (cloth : alkaline paper) 0226924246 (cloth : alkaline paper) 9780226924250 (paperback : alkaline paper) 0226924254 (paperback : alkaline paper) Shelf Location FLM2015 028165 CALL NUMBER E185.86 .S514 2013 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2)

• Patrick Sharkey - https://www.patricksharkey.net/

  Patrick Sharkey is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University. He is Scientific Director at Crime Lab New York, and is affiliated with NYU's Robert F. Wagner School for Public Service. At NYU, Sharkey teaches undergraduate courses on urban policy, crime, and violence, and doctoral courses in statistics and criminology. He recently returned from a year living in Nepal, and now lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

• NYU - https://wagner.nyu.edu/community/faculty/patrick-sharkey

  Patrick Sharkey is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University. He is Scientific Director at Crime Lab New York, and is affiliated with NYU's Robert F. Wagner School for Public Service. At NYU, Sharkey teaches undergraduate courses on urban policy, crime, and violence, and doctoral courses in statistics and criminology. He recently returned from a year living in Nepal, and now lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Sharkey_(professor)

  Patrick Sharkey (professor)
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  Patrick Sharkey
  Born c. 1977 (age 40–41)
  Alma mater Brown University (BA, 2000); Harvard University (PhD, 2007)
  Awards American Sociological Association Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section William Julius Wilson Early Career Award 2015; American Sociological Association Population Section Otis Dudley Duncan Book Award 2014; Eastern Sociological Society Mirra Komarovsky Book Award 2013; The American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) in Sociology and Social Work 2013.
  Scientific career
  Doctoral advisors Robert J. Sampson (chair), William Julius Wilson and Christopher Winship
  Patrick Sharkey (born c. 1977) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University,[1] with an affiliation at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.[2] Sharkey is the author of Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence,[3] published by W.W. Norton. The book focuses on how the decline of violent crime has affected urban life and urban inequality in America. His prior research considers the role of neighborhoods and cities in generating and maintaining inequality across multiple dimensions. His first book was published in 2013 with the University of Chicago Press, and was titled Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality.[4] The book received the Mirra Komarovsky Award[5] for the best book of the year from the Eastern Sociological Society, the Otis Dudley Duncan Award[6] from the Population Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and The American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award)[7] in Sociology and Social Work.

  Work
  Sharkey is the Scientific Director for Crime Lab New York City.[8] He was previously the Director for the Institute for Human Development and Social Change at New York University,[9] a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program Postdoctoral Scholar at Columbia University from 2007-2009,[10] and a Research Assistant at the Urban Institute[11] in Washington D.C. Labor and Social Policy Center from 2000-2002.

  Awards
  Sharkey received the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award[12] given by the Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association in 2015. In 2010, he received the Roger Gould Prize[13] given by the American Journal of Sociology for the best article published in 2008/2009,[14] and was co-winner of the best article in urban sociology published in 2008/2009[15] Jane Addams Award[16] given by the ASA Community and Urban Sociology Section.

• City Lab - https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/01/the-great-crime-decline-and-the-comeback-of-cities/549998/

  Police cars outside the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City
  Police cars outside the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City Brendan McDermid/Reuters
  The Great Crime Decline and the Comeback of Cities
  RICHARD FLORIDA JAN 16, 2018
  Patrick Sharkey, author of Uneasy Peace, talks to CityLab about how the drop in crime has transformed American cities.

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  Two of the most remarkable trends in recent years have been the tremendous decline in violent crime and the comeback of once downtrodden and written-off cities. In his new book, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life and the New War on Violence, New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey argues that these two trends are inextricably related. The decline in violent crime has paved the way for the urban revival, and the urban revival has in turn helped to stabilize neighborhoods and make them safer and better places to live. (Full disclosure: Sharkey is my NYU colleague, and I liked the advance copy of the book I read so much that I contributed an endorsement.)

  But all is not well. The peace we have today is indeed uneasy. And powerful forces, from the Trump administration to conservative state legislatures, are undertaking policies that can undo it. Cities and neighborhoods must step up and lead—and foundations and private-sector actors must help—if the crime decline and the urban revival it helped to set in motion are to endure.

  I caught up with Sharkey over the phone about the key ideas in his new book.

  Can you start by telling us a little bit about the Great Crime Decline and what it has meant for cities and urban neighborhoods?

  Violence started to rise in the 1960s and stayed at an extremely high level from the ‘70s to the beginning of the ‘90s. That’s when violence started to fall. By 2014, the homicide rate was 4.5 per 100,000 people, and that was the lowest rate in at least 50 years. 2014 was really one of the safest years in the history of the U.S.

  It happened because city spaces transformed. After years in which urban neighborhoods were largely abandoned, left on their own, a whole bunch of different actors came together and transformed urban neighborhoods. Part of that was the police. Law enforcement became more effective at what they were doing by using data about where police should be stationed, where the problems were arising. They started to shut down open-air drug markets to really end the crack epidemic, which was a major source of violent crime all over the country.

  There were other changes, too. Private security forces expanded. Private companies started hiring private security guards. Home-owners started to install alarm systems and camera systems. Technology improved that made motor-vehicle theft much less successful. Cities started to install camera systems.

  So it wasn’t just the police. It was about the transformation of urban spaces, about a set of changes that took place at the same time. Part of that was a very local mobilization against violence that was driven by residents and local organizations to retake parks, alleyways, city blocks, and to confront violence in a way that communities have always tried to do but that they did in a much more systematic and comprehensive way in the early 1990s. These local organizations had a causal effect on violence and their emergence should be seen alongside the expansion of police forces as one of the most important changes that took place in the 1990s.

  What about immigration and gentrification in cities?

  Let’s talk first about immigration. The neighborhoods where violence was most severe in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties were places where poverty was concentrated. They were deeply segregated by race. Many of these neighborhoods saw an influx of new residents, mostly from immigration. The dominant pattern of change was to shift from a majority African-American population to a more ethnically diverse population with new immigrant groups moving into segregated, very poor neighborhoods. These shifts played a role in revitalizing city neighborhoods and reducing violence.

  I also find in my research that the drop in violence helped bring about new shifts in population, particularly in high-poverty neighborhoods. But this is not the typical story about gentrification and the displacement of the poor. This is certainly a problem in some cities, but what has been much more common is that as a neighborhood becomes safer, it attracts new higher-income residents, with no evidence of poor residents moving out. I think that’s one of the most important consequences of the crime drop and one that is often overlooked. The crime decline led to a reduction of concentrated poverty.

  Jane Jacobs had the famous idea that it’s people and their “eyes on the street” that make places safe. You talk about the notion of a “community quarterback.” To what degree do these things actually make our neighborhoods less violent?

  I think the “eyes on the street” concept is exactly right. But it’s not about the presence of people. It’s about who takes responsibility for public spaces: Who are the institutions in the neighborhoods that provide informal sources of authority, respect, trust? Who is looking out for the community to ensure that it stays safe and that kids and the elderly population are taken care of?

  That element has to be present; when it’s not present, that’s when things go downhill. The notion of the “community quarterback” comes from an organization called Purpose Built Communities, which tries to build a single institution that will be there for the long haul and develop a plan for change around that institution.

  You note that not all cities saw the same kind of crime decline. In some places, like New York City, violent crime declined far more than in others. Tell us about the places that did not see such a large-scale crime decline.

  In the early 1990s, close to half of the major cities across the country were intensely violent places. A very small segment of cities is now intensely violent. Most cities are no longer dangerous. So that’s the broad shift: from a situation where city life was associated with violence to a situation where violence is anomalous. There’s no longer that large-scale link between urban life and violence.

  But then there are these caveats. The rate of violence in Baltimore is now as high as it’s ever been. In places like Newark, the level of violence has never fallen. The homicide rate in New York City and Newark looked very similar 25 years ago. But it hasn’t changed at all in Newark and it’s plummeted in New York City. Cincinnati also hasn’t seen a fall in violence.

  There’s not one clear answer. You have the broad trend and you have the city-by-city reality. A lot of the cities where violence has not fallen have had major issues with corrupt city governments and police forces. They have been dysfunctional places, where the police department, the city, and community organizations do not work well or at all together. This is a common feature of places that are unable to effectively respond to violence.

  The fundamental point in the book is that violence is not something that’s limited to victims and perpetrators. Violence reverberates around communities.
  How much do guns and gun control matter?

  The presence of guns makes violent crime much more lethal; this is an empirical reality. And the absence of guns changes the feel of a city. In New York City, when you walk the streets, you know that those around you are not carrying a gun; it transforms every part of city life. The bigger challenge is developing gun-control policies that will be effective, and I don’t think we have clear evidence that will guide us there.

  Is violence rising in the suburbs?

  Violent crime fell everywhere. We’re talking about a long-term decline in violence that happened everywhere—rural, suburban, and urban areas. That said, we have seen a shift in what the suburbs look like and the proportion of the population that lives there, and that shift has meant that at an absolute level there’s now more violence in suburban areas.

  You write: “Local violence does not make children less intelligent. Rather, it occupies their minds.” Can you tell us a little bit more about the interplay between crime, violence, and concentrated poverty, and the broad effects of growing up in a safe neighborhood versus a dangerous one?

  The fundamental point in the book is that violence is not something that’s limited to victims and perpetrators. Violence reverberates around communities. It affects everyone. And it undermines the community. You don’t have to be assaulted to be affected by violence.

  The first study that I did looked at a survey of children who lived in the same neighborhoods, but as part of a large study they were given assessments of cognitive abilities at different points in time. And purely by chance, some kids were given this assessment just before a local homicide had taken place in their neighborhood, some right after. The timing was completely random, so it allowed me to look at kids who lived in the same exact place and isolate the impact of being exposed to that incident, a homicide, which can completely change the feel of public space in a neighborhood.

  The results from that study were disturbing. The kids who took the assessment in the days after a local homicide had taken place scored as if they had regressed back to their level of academic skills from two years earlier. The effects were so large that I thought they were wrong. So we replicated it with an entirely different sample of children, and the magnitude of the second study was larger than the first.

  Since that first study, there have been several that have used similar approaches and reached the same conclusions. When you’re walking through city streets, worrying that you’re going to get jumped, worrying that you’re in danger, it is extremely difficult to then sit down and focus your attention on a pop quiz or a test.

  Violence is destructive. When a neighborhood isn’t safe, then nothing else works. It affects kids. It makes it less likely that families will invest in a home, that teachers will invest in a school, that business owners will open up shop. Violence undermines the community life in a fundamental way.

  What can we do about the fact that many of the places that have seen the greatest declines in violence are also the most unequal?

  This is a hugely important question for cities. The decline in violence has not overturned or even reduced the level of urban inequality. What I argue is that it has changed the experience of urban inequality. The poorest Americans are now victimized at a rate that is roughly equivalent to what the richest Americans used to be victimized at. It’s also made urban poverty less persistent, less sticky. In the places where crime has fallen most, kids are more likely to rise up out of poverty when they reach adulthood.

  That said, it has not overturned the rise of inequality. We have to develop explicit policies to make sure that neighborhoods are shared by rich and poor, by all segments of the city population, that there is affordable housing that is developed and sustained in every neighborhood in the city. I think the drop in violence is the first step in making these kinds of changes possible, but it’s only the first step.

  So, how uneasy is the crime decline? Can it unravel? Does it threaten the revival of our cities?

  Right now, it’s fragile. The reason is that the model we have relied on to get here is not sustainable. That model depends heavily on the police and the prison system to confront violence and to maintain public safety. Most cities have police departments that are adapting, realizing that dominating public space with brute force is no longer tolerable.

  We’re at a point right now where the peace is extremely fragile, where cities are adapting to a new model for confronting violence on the fly. That goes a long way toward explaining the divergent trajectories of cities over the last few years. I try to lay out a strategy for the shifting role law enforcement has to play and the new role that communities can play.

  What can cities do to lead here?

  Cities have to lead the way right now. There’s an urgent need for a short-term model to make sure urban neighborhoods don’t fall apart. That has become a major threat over the past few years as violence has risen. We’ve seen the Trump administration try to push us backward to the 1960s in terms of how to develop policies around policing, criminal justice, and urban disinvestment.

  How can cities lead the way? We have a chance to harness the different set of actors within cities that can make substantial investment to prevent violence. That includes not only city governments but also universities, nonprofits, and philanthropies. If we think about the types of investments that can make a transformative change in a particular community or neighborhood, those investments typically require resources at a scale that doesn’t often come from the government. That is much more likely to come from foundations or the private sector.

  The positive aspect is that reducing violence has such broad support that actors across the political spectrum are all invested in this. It is one of the few ideas that has uniform support across the U.S. The public thinks it’s urgent, politicians think it’s urgent, foundations think it’s urgent. So it’s harnessing that support and using it to make sure that every community has the institutions and organizations that will ensure that they don’t fall apart.

  There’s tremendous capacity for residents to play a greater role in this effort as well. If the police are going to step back from the role that law enforcement has played for the past 25 years, then a new set of actors are going to have to step up, and I think we have really strong evidence that residents mobilized in local organizations can play a central role.

  This interview has been edited and condensed.

• Policy Link - http://www.policylink.org/blog/interview-patrick-sharkey

  How Diverse Neighborhoods Spur Economic Mobility: An Interview with Patrick Sharkey
  Even for the generation of African Americans that came of age after the civil rights era, there has been little progress on economic equality, sociologist Patrick Sharkey writes in his new book, Stuck in Place. Drawing on national data, he shows that inequality persists because disadvantage is concentrated in neighborhoods and passed from generation to generation. Sharkey spoke with America's Tomorrow about strategies to change this legacy and build prosperous cities for all.

  Years of research show that neighborhood environments are key to understanding racial inequity. What's new in your argument?

  We have to think about where black and white children have lived, and where their families have lived, over long periods of time. Not just where families live at a given point in time but where families have lived over multiple generations. When we do that, we see that differences in the types of neighborhoods occupied by black and white Americans look much more severe. These differences in the types of environments in which families have lived over time go a long way towards explaining the persistence of racial inequality.

  Why is this long view important?

  The vast majority of African American families who are currently in poor neighborhoods — about 80 percent — have lived in similarly poor neighborhoods for at least two generations, even if they've moved from one place to another. That's true for about half of the small percentage of white families currently in poor neighborhoods. For black Americans, neighborhood poverty is a continuation of neighborhood disadvantage that has been experienced for long periods of time. That's important because the impact of growing up in a poor neighborhood is cumulative. It doesn't exist at a single point in time and then disappear.

  What are the cumulative impacts?

  When children are raised in a poor neighborhood, it affects their schooling environment and the social networks they form. There's very good evidence that it affects their mental health. It affects their economic opportunities as they move from childhood to young adulthood. Through all these pathways, growing up in a poor neighborhood affects multiple dimensions of people's lives and then, in turn, it affects the next generation.

  To what extent can neighborhood change break the cycle?

  When neighborhoods become more diverse, absorb new immigrant populations, and become less economically disadvantaged, meaning more jobs come in, the children in those neighborhoods benefit substantially. I found large improvements in economic outcomes much later in life among kids who lived in neighborhoods where poverty became less concentrated. Reducing the concentration of disadvantage is important for economic mobility.

  What two or three policies would significantly reduce the concentration of disadvantage?

  I'd start with large-scale mandatory inclusionary zoning policies, to break down economic segregation. And I'd focus on integrating the formerly incarcerated population back into the communities by providing economic opportunities to people as they return from prison. We need to find ways to make sure that the poor and non-white segments of the urban population are not living in separate communities from wealthy, predominantly white segments of the population. The separation of populations across the city allows for political abandonment. It allows for more and more unequal distribution of resources across communities.

  How do we simultaneously improve neighborhood environments and protect against displacement?

  We need to require that every locality build its fair share of affordable housing. And at a political level, we have to make sure that low-income representatives of low-income communities play a bigger role in all decisions about how land is used. Not just those that affect their own communities but decisions about zoning and housing across the city.

  What investments would you like to see to improve life chances for youth of color?

  Investments have to be made to create stable institutions in their communities. The most notable institution is the schools but I'm also talking about childcare centers, after-school programs, religious institutions, police departments working with the community, and anti-violence groups.

  You argue for "durable" urban policy. What does that mean?

  First, it's policies that have the capacity to disrupt multigenerational patterns of neighborhood inequality — not just to affect children but also to reach their parents. Second, it's policies that generate transformative changes in places and in family's lives. We can't have short-term investments in communities that are abandoned after a few years of implementation. Third, it's policies that have the capacity to withstand fluctuations in the political mood and the business cycle.

  These criteria may sound overly optimistic but the truth is we have made these commitments to communities across the country. It's only low-income communities of color that have been excluded from these types of major and sustained investments. I'm really arguing that the commitments that have been made to communities across the country be extended to these communities.

  Read the rest of the June 27, 2014 America’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model issue.

Print Marked Items
Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline,
the Renewal of City Life, and the Next
War on Violence
Kathleen McBroom
Booklist.
114.8 (Dec. 15, 2017): p82.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text: 
* Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence.
By Patrick Sharkey.
Jan. 2018. 256p. Norton, $26.95 (9780393609608). 306.
This is a well-documented, thoughtful look at major American cities and their comeback from deserted
ghost towns to thriving urban centers. Sharkey, sociology-department chair at NYU and scientific director of
Crime Lab New York (an independent organization dedicated to reducing crime, violence, and poverty),
analyzes change catalysts from past decades, introduces current programs and initiatives producing positive
results, and identifies resources to continue forward progress. He cites crime and demographic statistics as
he integrates interview and field-work insights. (Analyses address data from urban areas across the U.S.--not
just New York.) His key points: inner-city violence has undeniably declined, primarily due to diverse groups
(citizens, police and legal systems, community organizations) working together to reclaim public spaces; the
most disadvantaged members of society benefit the most from urban improvement (especially young
African American males); and there is need for substantial, sustained financial support, ongoing professional
training for all involved constituents, and continuing challenges to long-held principles, practices, and
attitudes. Sharkey presents his arguments logically, acknowledging and contextualizing seemingly
contradictory scenarios (e.g. Chicago, Las Vegas, St. Louis). This engaging, readable offering should attract
interest from city planners, law enforcement, urban dwellers, and anyone concerned about our cities.--
Kathleen McBroom
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
McBroom, Kathleen. "Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War
on Violence." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2017, p. 82. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521459546/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e910b8ae.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A521459546
Sharkey, Patrick: UNEASY PEACE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Sharkey, Patrick UNEASY PEACE Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 1, 16 ISBN: 978-0-393-60960-8
A sociologist's account of the "stunning" decline in urban American violence in the past two decades.
In a nuanced work based on three years of research on the ways in which dwindling crime has "altered" city
life--mainly for the better--Sharkey (Chair, Sociology/New York Univ.; Stuck in Place: Urban
Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality, 2013) provides significant new data
showing how, since the 1990s, cities have come back to life. Families returned from the suburbs. Poor
neighborhoods attracted newcomers. Schools became safer. Fewer homicides sparked "an improvement in
the life expectancy of black men that rivals any public health breakthrough of the last several decades."
Indeed, "2014 was the safest on record in New York, and one of the safest in U.S. history," he writes. Quick
to note that most Americans don't believe these trends (largely due to crime-heavy local news reporting and
outright misleading news), Sharkey shows how an era of intensive policing, punitive criminal justice
policies, aggressive prosecution of offenders, unprecedented incarceration, and uncommon mobilization of
community residents has produced these remarkable changes. He examines how neighborhood
organizations have emerged as "guardians" of urban spaces, the roles of private security and surveillance,
and the many benefits of safer streets, especially for the disadvantaged. There are excellent sections on how
children are affected by inequality and violence, the changing nature of life in gentrified Harlem and
Washington, D.C.'s Shaw neighborhood, and the role of videos in unleashing "intense, visceral anger" in
poor communities over clashes with police. With signs that violent crime has risen in the last few years, the
author argues that sustained investment in stronger neighborhoods (preparing them for the coming return of
incarcerated residents), with more community-minded police and other advocates, must occur under
concerted action by the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.
A rich, complex book that makes splendid use of data to trace the recent renaissance of city neighborhoods
and how children and the poor flourish in a time of relative peace.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Sharkey, Patrick: UNEASY PEACE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509244119/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d9f513cc.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509244119

McBroom, Kathleen. "Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2017, p. 82. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521459546/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 20 May 2018. "Sharkey, Patrick: UNEASY PEACE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509244119/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 20 May 2018.

• The New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-great-crime-decline
  Word count: 1484

  Books
  February 12 & 19, 2018 Issue
  The Great Crime Decline
  Drawing the right lessons from the fall in urban violence.

  By Adam Gopnik

  Poor and vulnerable communities have benefitted the most from the drop in crime.Illustration by Eiko Ojala

  Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.

  Big events go by unseen while we sweat the smaller stuff; things happen underground while we watch the boulevard parades. Truly underground, sometimes: in 1858, the pundits and politicians in Britain were obsessing over the British government’s takeover of India from the East India Company and the intentions of Napoleon III, yet the really big thing was the construction, with the supervisory genius of the great engineer Joseph Bazalgette, of a sewer system to protect London from its own waste, and so arrest the smelly “miasma” that had come to crisis conditions that year. This underground system, along with its visible embankments, would, both directly and by example, save countless lives in the developed world during the next century—making cholera epidemics, for instance, a thing of the distant past. But it got built in relative invisibility.

  In the United States over the past three decades, while people argue about tax cuts and terrorism, the wave of social change that has most altered the shape of American life, as much as the new embankments of the Thames changed life then, has been what the N.Y.U. sociologist Patrick Sharkey calls “the great crime decline.” The term, which seems to have originated with the influential Berkeley criminologist Franklin E. Zimring, refers to the still puzzling disappearance from our big-city streets of violent crime, so long the warping force of American life—driving white flight to the suburbs and fuelling the rise of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, not to mention the career of Martin Scorsese. (“Taxi Driver” is the great poem of New York around the height of high crime, with steam coming out of the hellish manholes and violence recumbent in the back seat.) No one saw it coming, and the still odder thing is that, once it came, no one seemed adequately equipped to praise it.

  Sharkey, who came of age in that safer era, intends to be its eulogist. He begins his remarkable new book, “Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence” (Norton), in the South Bronx, at a city block near Yankee Stadium, and recalls a time in the nineteen-seventies, whose climax was the fearsome blackout riots of 1977, when even the Stadium was sparsely attended. “In some years, night games drew ten thousand fewer fans than day games,” he writes; many New Yorkers were unwilling to make their way into the Bronx after dark. “Spaces that had been created to support public life, to be enjoyed by all—those that define city life in America’s greatest metropolis—were dominated by the threat of violence.” Now, he says, “the calm of Franz Sigel Park reflected the atmosphere of peace through New York City. In the city where more than 2,000 people used to be murdered each year, 328 were killed in 2014, the lowest tally since the first half of the twentieth century.” (Last year, the tally was still lower.) It wasn’t just New York. Violent crime fell in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Washington, and not by a little but by a lot.

  More important, the quality of life changed dramatically, particularly for the most vulnerable. Sharkey, studying the crime decline in six American cities, concludes, “As the degree of violence has fallen, the gap between the neighborhoods of the poor and nonpoor has narrowed.” In Cleveland in the eighties, the level of violence in poor neighborhoods was about seventy per cent higher than in the rest of the city; by 2010, that number had dropped to twenty-four per cent. The reduction of fear allowed much else to blossom: “Subway cars, commuter lines, and buses in U.S. cities filled up, as residents and commuters became more willing to leave their cars behind and travel to and from work together. . . . Fans came back to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and just as many began to show up for night games as for day games.” The big city was revived. From Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, the transformation of America’s inner cities from wastelands to self-conscious espresso zones became the comedy of our time.

  Yet little trace of this transformation troubles our art, or even much of our public discourse. Our pundits either take the great crime decline for granted or focus on the troubles it has helped create, like high housing prices in San Francisco or Brooklyn. Even when we pay attention to the comedy, we rarely look at the cause. Some of our politicians even pretend it hasn’t happened, with Donald Trump continuing to campaign against crime and carnage where it scarcely exists. (If people really thought that urban crime still flourished, of course, he wouldn’t be able to sell condos with his name on them on the far West Side of Manhattan.) Attorney General Jeff Sessions, meanwhile, feels free to tell the outrageous lie that “for the first time in a long time, Americans can have hope for a safer future.”

  This lack of appreciation is partly a question of media attention-deficit disorder: if there is little news value in Dog Bites Man, there is none whatever in Dog Does Not Bite Man. It is part of the neutral unseen background of events, even if there had previously been an epidemic of dog bites. But it’s hard for those who didn’t live through the great crime wave of the sixties, seventies, and eighties to fully understand the scale or the horror of it, or the improbability of its end. Every set of blocks had its detours; a new arrival in New York was told always to carry a ten-dollar bill in case of a mugging. Crime ruled Broadway comedies: Neil Simon’s “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” told the tale of people barricaded in their apartments for fear of muggings. My great-aunt and great-uncle lived on 115th and Riverside Drive; an address they boasted of in 1962 had become a neighborhood they were frightened to have company visit by 1975. For those trapped in true low-income, high-crime communities, these circumstances were even worse, with, as Sharkey shows, catastrophic effects not only on life and limb and property but on the fundamental human capacity for hope. In every way, the crime wave had effects far wider-reaching than its emergency-ward casualties. Liberal urbanists, who had been, perhaps mostly by chance, in power when the crime wave began, were discredited for a generation. The neocons gained credibility on foreign policy because they once seemed right about the Upper West Side.

  Sharkey, unlike many of his peers on the left, regards the great decline as an unmediated good, benefitting everyone, and, above all, the poorest and most vulnerable. Sharkey’s book, in fact, illustrates why social science, with all its uncertainties—uncertainties built into a field in which you are studying the actions of several million autonomous agents who can alter their actions at a whim, with several thousand outliers guaranteed in advance to be bizarrely atypical—still really is science. What makes it science is what makes it social: an insistence on paying attention to the facts that other people have gathered even when they conflict with the way you want the world to be; a reluctance to tailor the facts to one’s views, instead of one’s views to the facts.

  You might wonder that anyone would dispute the notion that the crime decline is a good thing for everyone, but some do, either sentimentally—what ever became of all the lively crack dealers and Forty-second Street prostitutes?—or sententiously: a “cleaned up” city dismissed as merely sanitized, with the social problems pushed to the periphery. Sharkey, a sympathizer with progressive causes, sees the position in which urban crime is taken to be a kind of political violence—an as yet insufficiently organized program of dissent—for the academic indulgence that it is. The view that violent crime is a kind of instinctive form of political protest is not a new one, or entirely outlandish. We take it for granted, thinking of the poverty-stricken thieves, hanged for stealing handkerchiefs in eighteenth-century London, that the argument of the “The Beggar’s Opera” is not wrong: even when not explicitly political, crime can have an implicit politics. But though these arguments—like the parallel ones about when terrorism becomes patriotism and patriotism terrorism—are easy to make, they are hard to use as helpful guides to the real world.

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