[If he (or she?--Ruth Messinger, maybe) allows crime to rise significantly it could put a damper on the tourist trade. If that same new mayor, fishing for revenues, starts to squeeze the entertainment industries for fees and taxes, they'll look elsewhere as well.]
How does a Mayor 'allow crime to rise'?
One of the biggest misconceptions is that more Police or the re-distribution of Police forces can PREVENT crime. Realistically, most Police arrive on the scene AFTER a crime has been committed and rarely deter criminality.
The reason for the drop in crime is that people -- THE CITIZENS --decided to do something about crime. This means that those neighborhoods that were heavily crime-ridden have had one of three things happen: (1) the people in those areas decided to take charge of their lives -- meaning raising their kids to (a) respect other peoples' property and (b) stay away from drugs and other social degenerative activities; (2) those who had brought those neighborhoods down have been supplanted by new immigrants who are law abiding and raise their children with higher standards than those of the previous generation; the economics of the past 10 years has made it possible for those who tended to be less fortunate (and thus resort to crime) to find work that was at less more than transient (that is now the work of those from South and Central America now).
Again, a Police presence does help, but the large percentage of crime dropping is largely related to both social and economic factors.
Doug aka BMTman