" There’d been 350 fewer murders in 1994 than in 1993; 650 fewer than in 1990. Even Bratton didn’t take all the credit: “Nobody can be sure exactly what is going on,” he told the Times in an article titled “When Crime Recedes: New York Crime Falls, But Just Why Is a Mystery.” What the NYPD could own was the start of a virtuous cycle. At first, “fear,” wrote Fred Siegel, “declined even more rapidly than crime.” Subway ridership was up, and more New Yorkers spending more time in public space dampened opportunistic crime. The next year, murders fell to a 25-year low, making the panic over young Black superpredators appear less like science and more like White panic, but theories on both sides were being disproved. Three-quarters of New Yorkers below the poverty line were statistically in “extreme poverty,” and by 1998, more than 600,000 people a month relied on emergency meals, more than twice the number as when Giuliani took office, so if hunger made you a criminal, crime should have been shooting up. Nor were the moral measures that a Manhattan Institute type might look for—single-parent homes, for example—getting any better. "

― Thomas Dyja , New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation