leads the nation with its 73.6 percent drop; it goes straight to the mid- dle of the pack. Many of those new police were in fact hired by David Dinkins, the mayor whom Giuliani defeated. Dinkins had been des- perate to secure the law-and-order vote, having known all along that his opponent would be Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor. (The two men had run against each other four years earlier as well.) So those who wish to credit Giuliani with the crime drop may still do so, for it was his own law-and-order reputation that made Dinkins hire all those police. In the end, of course, the police increase helped every- one-but it helped Giuliani a lot more than Dinkins. Most damaging to the claim that New Yorks police innovations           radically lowered crime is one simple and often overlooked fact: crime went down everywhere during the 1990s, not only in New York. Few other cities tried the kind of strategies that New York did, and cer- tainly none with the same zeal. But even in Los Angeles, a city notori- ous for bad policing, crime fell at about the same rate as it did in New York once the growth in New Yorks police force is accounted for. It would be churlish to argue that smart policing isnt a good thing. Bill Bratton certainly deserves credit for invigorating New Yorks po- lice force. But there is frighteningly little evidence that his strategy was the crime panacea that he and the media deemed it. The next step will be to continue measuring the impact of police innovations-in Los Angeles, for instance, where Bratton himself became police chief in late 2002. While he duly instituted some of the innovations that were his hallmark in New York, Bratton announced that his highest priority was a more basic one: finding the money to hire thousands of new police officers.