The Crime Statistics

Editorial of The New York Sun
October 9, 2006

When Mayor Bloomberg hits the presidential campaign trail, one of the most impressive achievements he will be able to sell to a national electorate is how he has not just maintained the progress his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani, made in respect of livability in the city, but has improved on Mr. Giuliani's already impressive record. The record is underscored by the latest year-to-date crime figures. New York bucked a national upward trend by driving crime down to new lows.

Not all the reaction to the news was as positive as one would expect. The New York Times insisted on seeing the glass half empty with a headline reading "Despite a Decrease in City Crime, Troubling Signs Emerge." While the Gray Lady acknowledged that that crime had fallen 5% in New York "even as it is creeping up in many other American cities," the Times claimed that by "digging deeper into the city's numbers" it had uncovered "some worrisome trends" — namely (the Times documented but one trend), youth arrests, an increase which was reported a week earlier in the New York Sun based on the Mayor's management report.

This reminds us of the famous liberal complaint about how prison populations are at record levels despite the drop in crime. The fact is that the increase in youth arrests is no doubt one reason why crime is falling. Certainly the single most important lesson from the Giuliani years is that aggressive policing works, a point made by Heather MacDonald in the summer issue of City Journal. While other major cities never embraced stepped-up policing to the extent New York did and abandoned many of the most innovative techniques as soon as crime rates started to dip, New York has never let up under the leadership of Mr. Bloomberg and the police commissioner, Ray Kelly.

If it weren't for a doubling of the year-to-date number of deaths attributed by the medical examiner to prior year incidents (such as a 74-year-old whose fatal contraction of pneumonia this year was attributed to a shooting that paralyzed him 32 years ago), homicides would be down 1% compared to this time last year. Either way, New York City is poised to end the year with either the lowest number of murders in over 40 years or the second lowest number of murders in over 40 years. As for gun crimes, shootings are down this year.

Progress isn't always even across all 76 police precincts, as is seen by looking, as the Times did, at two, one in Harlem and another on Staten Island, where homicides had doubled year-to-date from six and seven respectively last year to 13 in each precinct this year. Yet for every swing upward in one place, there was a comparable downward swing somewhere else. That's why homicides so far this year are essentially flat compared to last year. For example, last year at this point in the 83rd Precinct in Brooklyn there were 13 homicides, compared to three now. Similarly, in the 106th Precinct in Queens last year, there has been only one homicide so far this year, compared to seven year-to-date at this time last year.

New York is not the city today that it was in 1994, and a lot of that has to do with reductions in crime. We haven't agreed with some of Mayor Bloomberg's crime-fighting strategies, such as a drive for ever more gun control that strikes us as unconstitutional and beside the point anyway. It's undeniable, however, that Messrs Bloomberg and Kelly are on the right track, finding ways to devote policing resources to ordinary crime fighting even while they shift more law enforcement power to counter-terrorism. That's an achievement that no amount of creative statistical interpretation can erase.