to those with limited education and job skills. During this same period, large numbers of Puerto Ricans from the Caribbean island and African-Americans from the South emigrated to New York City looking for employment. East New York, no longer replete with the jobs the new residents had come for, was thereby faced with a host of new socioeconomic problems, including widespread unemployment and crime. Social problems Since the late 1950s East New York has had some of the highest crime rates in Brooklyn, and is considered by some to be the borough's murder capital, alongside Brownsville. Many social problems associated with poverty from crime to drug addiction have been prevalent in the area for decades. Despite the decline of crime compared to their peaks during the crack and heroin epidemics, violent crime continues to be widespread in the community. East New York's 75th Police Precinct reported the highest murder rate in the city in 2011, according to crime reports compiled by DNAinfo.com. East New York has significantly higher dropout rates and incidences of violence in its schools. Students must pass through metal detectors and swipe ID cards to enter the buildings. Other problems in local schools include low test scores and high truancy rates. Walter Thabit, a city planner for East New York, chronicled in his 2003 book, How East New York Became a Ghetto, the change in population from mostly working class Italians and Jewish residents to residents of Puerto Rican and African American descent. Thabit argues that landlords and real estate agents played a significant role in the downturn of the area. Puerto Ricans were moving to New York City in the late 1950s, at a time when unemployment rates in Puerto Rico soared to 25 percent, and left Puerto Rico on the brink of poverty. By 1966, Blacks and Puerto Ricans were the majority of the neighborhood with around 48,000 Black residents, 30,000 Puerto Rican residents, and 22,000 remaining White residents mostly Italian and Jewish residents, though eventually pretty much almost all of the White residents would vacate out of the neighborhood in the later decades. Poverty became very highly concentrated with the neighborhood's population largely being on welfare benefits by the 1960s as well as the neighborhood also began to suffer with a lot of arson and fires to property buildings and as well as buildings and houses increasingly becoming abandoned by previously occupied Italian and