The chairman of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, Peter Vallone Jr., was quoted recently in the New York Post bemoaning the decline in numbers in the police force. “We’re seeing the beginnings of a return to the bad old days,” Mr. Vallone was quoted as saying. “We should never forget that we’re a thousand percent better off now than we were in 1991, when we had only 31,000 police officers on the street, and we made a decision, through the Safe Cities program, to increase that number by 10,000. But 1991 is not where the comparison is anymore. The comparison is with 2001, when we had 41,000 officers on the street. That number has been allowed to dwindle.”

Well, Mr. Vallone has collected $3,500 in campaign contributions from the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, a labor union that collects more in dues money for every New York City police officer hired. But from the perspective of a taxpayer, measuring the success of a government agency by the number of employees it employs is an odd yardstick. The number of police officers is an input. The more logical measure is output, that is, success in crime fighting. If the Bloomberg administration has managed, in fighting crime, to do more with less, it deserves not condemnation but praise. Mr. Vallone’s approach is like measuring the success of schools by the number of teachers rather than by how much the students learn.

As it turns out, the city’s spending on the Police Department has actually grown since 2001, to $3.7 billion a year from $3.3 billion a year, according to the pocket guide of the Citizens Budget Commission. But if one focuses on the outputs rather than the inputs, what emerges is a remarkable success story, starting with the measure of murders for each 100,000 population. Murder is considered the most reliable of crime statistics, because it doesn’t depend on how many arrests police make or how willing victims are to report crimes.

It turns out that New York City last year had a murder rate of 6 murders for each 100,000 population, compared to 10 murders for each 100,000 persons in Los Angeles, 37.5 for each 100,000 in Newark and 95 for each 100,000 in New Orleans. In 2001, New York City had 714 murders. The terrorist attacks of September 11, as an act of war, are not included in the crime statistics. As of the most recent statistics available for this year, which go through June 29, the department was on track for a year with about 500 murders in the city, which would be about a 30% reduction from 2001.

Overall, major crimes measured by CompStat are down 28.62% since 2001. These reductions far outperform national averages as measured both by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports and by the National Crime Victimization Survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the Department of Justice. All of this has been accomplished at the same time that the New York Police Department has launched an unprecedented and widely admired counterterrorism program that has devoted significant resources toward preventing a terrorist attack in New York City. And 2001 is itself a high bar, the best crime-fighting year of a Giuliani administration that made policing a priority and that itself made major strides in crime reduction.

There is plenty of credit to go around for the progress, including to Governor Pataki for appointing tough-on-crime appeals judges and to the district attorneys and federal law enforcement officials, not to mention the police officers on the front lines. But certainly a good portion of the credit belongs to the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly. He has achieved a record that would be a credit to a candidate for mayor, should he choose to run. At the least, it is a record that would merit a decision by the next mayor to keep the police commissioner in office were he willing to continue to serve, or a decision by the next president to elevate him to a national crime-fighting post.