Cutting Crime and Restoring Order: What America Can Learn from New York's Finest

TL;DR — Heritage Lecture No. 573, in which former NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton explains how New York cut serious crime by about a third in 1994–96 and what other cities could copy.

A lecture delivered at the Heritage Foundation and published as The Heritage Lectures No. 573, introduced by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III. Meese’s introduction credits Bratton’s tenure as New York City police commissioner (1994–96) with a 36 percent fall in serious crime and a 45 percent fall in murder.

Bratton argues, as “an optimist when it comes to the issue of crime,” that police departments had begun to find answers: management reform, strategic deployment of resources and attention to public order. He draws on his earlier work with Meese at Harvard on policing and on his time running the Boston Police and New York Transit Police.

What it is: a published think-tank lecture by the practitioner himself — a primary source on the 1990s New York policing turnaround, from a conservative policy institute.

Where this came from

• A copy saved in October 2026.
• Heritage Foundation’s own page for the lecture: https://www.heritage.org/node/9814 (dated October 15, 1996, in search results; the page blocks scripted requests, so it was not fetched directly).

17 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.