How New York's Private Doormen Became the City's Unsung Crime Fighters
How New York's Private Doormen Became the City's Unsung Crime Fighters
A Case Study in Private Interest Creating Public Good
By Dancing Dragons Media
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1980s1990s
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How New York's Private Doormen Became the City's Unsung Crime Fighters: A Case Study in Private Interest Creating Public Good
There's a peculiar irony at the heart of New York City's complicated relationship with public safety: while politicians and police commissioners take credit for crime reduction, thousands of uniformed sentinels stand watch every day, largely invisible to the broader conversation about what keeps neighborhoods safe. I'm talking about doormen—those private security forces that have quietly maintained order on countless blocks while the rest of the city debated policing strategies.
The more I've thought about this, the more obvious it seems. During periods when public safety seemed on the verge of collapse, when crime threatened to spiral completely out of control, doormen were there. Not by policy or government decree, but by virtue of being paid to stand watch, hour after hour, on some of the city's most vulnerable streets.
But here's what makes this story remarkable: doormen represent one of the clearest examples in modern urban history of private interests accidentally generating massive public goods. They were hired to protect private property and wealthy residents. Yet in doing so, they secured entire neighborhoods, protected people who never paid them a dime, and arguably saved New York City from a crime spiral that could have made it permanently ungovernable.
The Eyes That Never Sleep
Walk through Manhattan's Upper East Side, Upper West Side, or increasingly gentrified neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, and you'll notice something: blocks with doormen feel different. There's an ambient sense of security that has nothing to do with police presence and everything to do with human observation.
Doormen work eight to twelve-hour shifts. They know who belongs on their block and who doesn't. They notice the person lingering too long by a parked car. They see the same suspicious character circling back three times. They're watching when someone attempts to follow a resident into a building. And crucially, they're there at 3 AM, when police patrols are stretched thin and most businesses are shuttered.
This isn't theoretical. During the 1970s and 1980s, when New York City was experiencing what many considered an existential crime crisis, there was a stark pattern: buildings with doormen remained relatively safe islands in increasingly dangerous neighborhoods. While street crime exploded, the immediate perimeters around these buildings stayed calmer. Muggers and thieves learned to avoid blocks where someone was always watching.
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The Economics of Spillover Effects
Here's where the economics become fascinating. When a co-op board or landlord hires a doorman, they're making a straightforward business calculation: the cost of salary and benefits versus the value of increased security and property values for their specific building. They're not thinking about the walk-up apartment building next door, or the brownstone across the street, or the bodega on the corner.
But those neighbors benefit anyway. A doorman watching the street doesn't only deter crimes against his building—he makes the entire block safer. The bodega owner experiences fewer shoplifting incidents. The family in the walk-up is less likely to get mugged coming home at night. The elderly woman walking her dog at 10 PM is protected by eyes she didn't pay for.
Economists call these "positive externalities"—benefits that spill over to people who didn't pay for them. And in the case of doormen, the externalities are enormous. One building's security expenditure creates safety for an entire block, sometimes an entire neighborhood. The private good purchased by wealthy building owners transforms into a public good enjoyed by everyone in proximity.
This is the invisible hand working in ways Adam Smith never quite articulated. Self-interested actions by property owners, seeking only to protect their investments and residents, inadvertently protected the broader urban fabric. They created what economists call a "public good" through purely private means.
The Broken Windows Theory, Privately Funded
The famous "broken windows" theory of policing—popularized by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982—argued that maintaining order and addressing small signs of disorder prevents more serious crime from taking root. While the NYPD's implementation of this theory through aggressive stop-and-frisk policies became controversial, doormen had been practicing a version of it for decades without fanfare or civil liberties concerns.
A doorman's job includes preventing disorder in their immediate environment. They ensure people aren't loitering in front of their building. They keep an eye on the sidewalk, sometimes sweeping it themselves. They create an atmosphere of maintained, watched space. This isn't heavy-handed policing—it's simply the presence of consistent human attention.
The economic logic is straightforward: property owners in expensive buildings pay for this security because it works. They've run the cost-benefit analysis over generations. Doormen reduce crime, protect property values, and create the kind of neighborhood stability that justifies premium rents and co-op prices. If it didn't work, the market would have eliminated the position long ago.
But again, the benefits radiate outward. When a doorman maintains order on his stretch of sidewalk, the entire block looks more maintained. The signal that "someone is watching here" affects criminal calculations for the whole area. The private investment in order creates a public atmosphere of safety.
The Crisis Years: When Doormen Held the Line
To understand the true impact of doormen on New York's crime trajectory, you need to look at what happened during the city's darkest periods. In the mid-1970s, New York was functionally broke. Police staffing was cut. Response times increased. Entire neighborhoods seemed to be surrendering to criminal chaos.
But even as the city teetered on the edge, certain areas maintained relative safety. The Upper East Side, with its density of doorman buildings, never descended into the chaos that consumed other neighborhoods. The same was true for portions of the Upper West Side, Gramerey Park, and other areas with high concentrations of attended buildings.
This wasn't because criminals were politely respecting property lines. It was because blocks with doormen presented harder targets. Criminals, like anyone else, respond to incentives. Why attempt a mugging on a block where someone is watching and will immediately call police, when you can walk two blocks over to an unattended street?
The displacement effect was real, and it was cruel to neighborhoods without private security. But it also prevented crime from reaching a critical mass where the entire city might have become ungovernable. Doormen created pockets of stability that preserved the idea that New York could be safe, even when much of it wasn't.
This is where private interest most clearly served public good. The wealthy weren't paying doormen to save New York City—they were paying to protect their own buildings. But in aggregate, these private security forces prevented complete urban collapse. They maintained neighborhoods that still functioned, still attracted residents and businesses, still generated tax revenue. They provided anchors of stability in a sea of disorder.
Without these privately maintained zones of safety, the downward spiral would have been complete. Middle-class families would have had nowhere to point to as evidence that New York could work. Businesses would have found no safe neighborhoods to operate in. The tax base would have collapsed entirely. The city might never have recovered.
Beyond Crime Prevention: Community Intelligence Networks
Doormen do something else that's crucial to neighborhood stability: they gather and share intelligence. They talk to each other. They know what's happening on their block and adjacent blocks. They pass information to residents and, when necessary, to police.
This informal intelligence network is remarkably effective. When a pattern of break-ins starts in a neighborhood, doormen often identify it before official crime statistics register the trend. They notice when new groups start hanging around. They can describe suspects with detail that general witnesses might miss. They provide continuity of observation that even dedicated police patrols can't match.
During various crime waves over the decades, this intelligence function became critical. While police departments struggled with understaffing and limited community trust in certain neighborhoods, doormen maintained relationships with residents and a stake in keeping their immediate areas safe. They were embedded, reliable observers in a way that rotating police patrols could never be.
And here's another externality: doormen often share information with nearby businesses, other buildings, and residents who aren't their direct employers. A doorman who notices a scam artist working the neighborhood might warn the superintendent of a nearby building, or mention it to regulars he sees on the street. This information sharing, completely voluntary and unpaid, creates a neighborhood-wide security network that benefits everyone.
The co-op board paying a doorman's salary gets first priority for his attention, certainly. But the intelligence he gathers and sometimes shares creates value far beyond that single building. It's another example of private employment generating public benefit.
The Free Rider Problem—And Why It Didn't Matter
In traditional economic theory, this kind of positive externality creates a "free rider problem." If your neighbor's doorman makes your building safer without you paying anything, why would you hire your own doorman? Everyone has an incentive to free ride on others' security spending, which should lead to under-provision of the public good.
But New York's doorman system avoided this trap through a combination of factors. First, the direct benefits to the hiring building were substantial enough to justify the cost regardless of externalities. You got better package handling, resident services, and most importantly, building-specific security worth paying for even if no spillover effects existed.
Second, there was a status component. Doorman buildings commanded higher prices and rents partly because of the service level and prestige, not just security. This created market incentives that didn't depend on anyone calculating neighborhood-wide effects.
Third, the effects were so localized that free riding was limited. A building three blocks away didn't benefit much from your doorman. The positive externalities were concentrated on your immediate block, where the beneficiaries were often renters or owners who couldn't practically hire their own doormen anyway.
This alignment of private incentives with public benefits is rare and precious in urban policy. Usually, market incentives pull against collective goods. But doormen represented a case where pursuing narrow self-interest happened to serve the broader community.
The Uncomfortable Class Dynamics—And Why They Don't Invalidate the Public Good
Of course, there's an uncomfortable truth here: doormen primarily protect the wealthy. This is private security financed by those who can afford buildings expensive enough to justify the cost. The safety dividends of doormen are not equally distributed across the city's economic spectrum.
Critics might argue that I'm essentially celebrating a system where the rich buy their own safety while the poor remain vulnerable. And there's validity to that critique. The presence of doormen represents a failure of public safety systems to provide equal protection to all neighborhoods.
But here's the harder truth: without doormen, crime in New York likely would have spiraled even more dramatically during the crisis years. The complete collapse of safety in the entire city, including its wealthier neighborhoods, would have triggered even more dramatic white flight and capital flight than actually occurred. The tax base would have evaporated further. The city's descent might have become irreversible.
Doormen, in effect, helped keep enough of the city stable enough that recovery remained possible. They provided proof that New York could still be livable, which prevented the total abandonment that could have occurred if every neighborhood had become equally dangerous.
Yes, this created inequality in safety. Yes, it's unjust that some neighborhoods got private security while others got nothing. But the counterfactual—a New York where even wealthy neighborhoods became completely unsafe—would have been worse for everyone. The city needed those anchors of stability, however unfairly distributed, to survive.
This is the messy reality of how cities actually work. Perfect equity in safety provision might have meant equally high crime everywhere, with no tax base to fund recovery, no neighborhoods to model what safety looked like, no reason for anyone to stay. Unequal private security, whatever its moral problems, served the public interest by preventing total collapse.
The Modern Era: Still Relevant, Still Generating Public Benefits
Even as New York has become dramatically safer since the 1990s—due to a complex mix of factors including changing demographics, economic growth, and yes, policing strategies—doormen remain crucial to neighborhood security. The surveillance state has expanded with cameras and technology, but human observation still matters.
Walk through neighborhoods during the 2020 crime surge that accompanied the pandemic and civil unrest, and the pattern repeated: blocks with doormen bounced back faster. The presence of consistent human monitoring prevented the kind of disorder that could have cascaded into something worse.
Doormen adapted during the pandemic, adding health screening to their security functions. They managed building access during lockdowns, monitored deliveries when online shopping exploded, and maintained their role as stable presences in an unstable time. Once again, they helped prevent disorder from taking root. Once again, the benefits spilled over to entire blocks and neighborhoods.
And the externality effect continues. Every building that maintains a doorman makes its block safer for everyone. The bodega stays in business partly because doormen reduce shoplifting and create foot traffic. The families in non-doorman buildings benefit from the watched street. The elderly can walk more safely. Small businesses face fewer break-ins.
The private expenditure on doormen—now totaling hundreds of millions of dollars annually across the city—continues to generate public safety benefits worth far more than the direct spending. It's a subsidy to public safety that taxpayers never have to fund.
What Policymakers Should Learn: Harnessing Private Interest for Public Good
The success of doormen offers several lessons for public safety policy, but the most important is this: sometimes the best way to provide public goods is to align private incentives with public benefits rather than trying to provide everything through government.
First, presence matters. Consistent human observation of public space deters crime more effectively than sporadic patrols. Second, local knowledge and relationships are crucial—doormen work the same locations and know their environments intimately. Third, the appearance of order and maintenance matters in preventing crime.
But fourth, and most importantly: private actors pursuing their own interests can generate enormous public benefits if the structure is right. The challenge for policy is to find ways to encourage or replicate this alignment elsewhere.
Could cities offer tax incentives for buildings that employ doormen or security personnel, recognizing the public safety externalities they create? Could business improvement districts hire street ambassadors who perform similar functions? Could residential neighborhoods organize and fund their own security presences, subsidized by city grants that recognize the public value created?
The point isn't to privatize public safety entirely. It's to recognize that private security spending can complement public policing in ways that benefit everyone, and to find ways to encourage more of it, more equitably distributed. If wealthy buildings are already creating positive externalities through doormen, perhaps policy should focus on extending similar benefits to neighborhoods that can't afford them privately.
Some cities have experimented with "public space attendants" or "neighborhood ambassadors"—publicly funded positions that perform some doorman-like functions for commercial districts or residential areas. These programs explicitly recognize that watched, maintained spaces stay safer, and that presence matters more than traditional patrols.
New York itself has expanded this through Business Improvement Districts, which fund security personnel for commercial areas using mandatory assessments on local businesses. It's essentially collective funding of doorman-like presence, socializing the costs to match the public benefits.
The Broader Principle: When Markets Serve Society
The doorman story illustrates a broader principle about how private action can serve public interests without central planning or government provision. Markets and private enterprise don't always generate positive externalities—often they create negative ones, like pollution or congestion. But when they do create public benefits, we should recognize and nurture that.
New York's doormen weren't designed as a crime-fighting strategy. No urban planner decided that private security forces should protect neighborhoods. No policy document outlined how doorman buildings would create zones of stability during crisis periods. It happened organically, through thousands of individual decisions by property owners pursuing their narrow interests.
Yet the cumulative effect was profound. Private security spending helped save a city. Narrow self-interest served the common good. Wealthy people protecting their own buildings inadvertently protected their neighbors, their blocks, their neighborhoods, and ultimately contributed to saving New York itself.
This is the invisible hand at its most powerful—not perfectly efficient markets allocating resources, but the messy, organic process by which private actions sometimes aggregate into public benefits. It's not a replacement for government and public goods provision. But it's a reminder that civil society, markets, and private initiative can solve problems that seem to require state action.
The question is whether we can learn from this accidental success. Can we deliberately structure incentives to generate more positive externalities? Can we recognize and amplify cases where private interest serves public good? Can we extend the benefits more equitably while preserving the incentives that created them?
The Undercelebrated Truth: Private Interest as Public Savior
No one gives out awards to doormen for crime prevention. They don't testify before city council about public safety strategies. They're not quoted in think pieces about policing reform. They're simply there, shift after shift, watching the street, protecting buildings they're paid to protect, and inadvertently protecting everyone else too.
But if you're looking for an honest explanation of how New York avoided complete collapse during its worst periods, you need to account for these thousands of private sentries. They didn't solve the city's crime problem—no single factor did. But they prevented certain neighborhoods from spiraling, maintained pockets of stability, and created models of what safe streets looked like even when much of the city was struggling.
More importantly, they demonstrated a principle that policymakers often overlook: private actors pursuing narrow self-interest can generate enormous public benefits when the incentive structure aligns properly. The wealthy paying for their own security happened to secure entire neighborhoods. Self-interested spending on doormen happened to help save a city.
The story of New York's recovery from near-death in the 1970s to its current status as one of America's safest large cities is usually told through mayors and police commissioners, demographic shifts and economic forces. That story is incomplete without acknowledging the role of an army of private security workers who simply showed up every day, watched the street, and made crime harder to commit.
They were always there, painfully obvious in their presence once you thought to look. And that visibility—that constant human observation funded by private dollars but benefiting everyone—made all the difference.
The doormen saved New York not because they were heroes or because anyone planned it that way, but because private interest aligned with public good. They stand as proof that markets and civil society can sometimes solve collective action problems without government intervention—and as a challenge to policymakers to find ways to replicate that alignment more deliberately and equitably across the urban landscape.
In the end, the most important urban policy lesson might be this: sometimes the best way to provide public safety isn't to provide it publicly at all, but to create conditions where private actors, pursuing their own interests, generate safety as a byproduct. New York stumbled into this solution through the accident of doorman culture. Other cities might learn from this and find their own ways to harness private interest for public good.
