A decade ago, the Bushwick neighborhood in Brooklyn was so riddled with drug dealers and thieves that police called it "the well": They knew they could dip in anytime and pick up as many people as they needed to beef up their arrest statistics.

Today, boxes of fresh white mops and new brooms sit for sale unattended outside Popular Hardware, just off bustling Knickerbocker Avenue. They testify to a remarkable transformation under way in Bushwick and throughout New York.

"It's pretty safe," says Won Yoo, as he sits behind the counter of his store chatting with customers. "Conditions have improved a lot in 10 years."

And they're still getting better – a phenomenon that has surprised many criminologists. With the economy in a tailspin and police preoccupied with the terrorist threat, many predicted that crime would spike upward in the nation's largest city, just as it has done in other metro areas. But it hasn't. Crime in New York is down more than 5 percent so far this year. It was down that much last year as well, compared with a 2.1 percent increase nationally.

Theories abound about why New York just keeps getting safer. They include the so-called "9/11 effect" of people looking out for their neighbors, improved police-community relations under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and increased numbers of homeowners, which have stabilized neighborhoods like Bushwick. Experts, however, say there's no single silver bullet.

"There's the lack of [organized] gangs," says Richard Curtis, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "The drug business here is mostly marijuana and Ecstasy, neither of which are associated with high levels of violence. And then there's the orientation of youths today, which is very conservative."

Throughout the 1990s, New York led the nation with sharp reductions in crime. At the time, much of the credit was given to the improved economy and policing strategies under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Those strategies included the "Compstat" system, which allows police to track crimes weekly and precinct by precinct, so they can shift resources where they're needed. While that undoubtedly has played a role, Bronx community activist Karen Washington says the police's "Rambo-style" tactics also produced deep resentment and undermined their credibility in many neighborhoods.

The Bloomberg administration has kept Compstat, but it has also put an emphasis on better relations with the city's 12,000 community organizations. Ms. Washington says that's helped improve police effectiveness in her Crotona neighborhood.

But she credits the people, as much as the police, for pulling together to take back their neighborhoods. "They just got sick and tired of being sick and tired," she says. "There's less tolerance for stepping over crack vials and less tolerance for kids you knew in diapers suddenly trying to be some big drug dealer you're supposed to be scared of."

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