Judith Miller suggests that had the Tsarnaev brothers planned a terror attack in New York City, there is a good chance that they’d have been stopped by the NYPD. The NYPD’s intelligence and counterterrorism divisions are the gold standard for local police forces worldwide, and their 1,000 counterterrorism police officers and analysts have cultivated strong ties with Muslim communities in and around the five boroughs. Replicating the NYPD’s extensive and expensive efforts is probably infeasible for most large U.S. cities, let alone small ones. But the NYPD’s success in this regard is further evidence that the quality of local government matters a great deal, and measures that tend to increase the quality of local government, like those championed by the legal academic David Schleicher, are worth pursuing. Policies that attract more people will tend to lead to more revenue, and more revenue can translate into better services (note the “can”), including better protective services.