Posted on 12/23/2004 8:59:56 PM PST by neverdem
Homicides in New York City are down more than 5 percent as the year draws to a close, continuing a remarkable 14-year decline that has long confounded experts. Five of the other six major crime categories have also dropped.
As of yesterday morning, with barely more than a week to go in 2004, there had been 549 slayings in the city, down from 579 in the same period last year and from 2,245 in all of 1990, at the height of the crack epidemic. In all, 597 people were slain in the city in 2003.
A few of the country's largest cities have improved on New York's decline, notably Chicago, with a stunning 25 percent decrease in homicides from last year to this year. In the first six months of the year, cities with populations over a million drove their homicide rate down an average of 8.7 percent, according to F.B.I. statistics. But experts say that those cities, many of which have adopted New York's crime-fighting strategies, are playing catch-up, while New York is trimming the fat ever closer to the bone.
"When you lose weight, it's always easier to lose the first pounds than the latter pounds," said Eli Silverman, a professor of police studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "What other cities have done is quite remarkable, but on the other hand it has to be taken into consideration where they were before. The fact that New York still went down is even more remarkable."
In the country's 10 largest cities, the homicide rate (the number of murders per 100,000 people each year) was 12.4, according to the F.B.I.'s most recent data. In New York, it was 6.8.
New York's overall number of serious crimes also declined, by 4.6 percent, with only one category, grand larceny, increasing. The drop in crime has defied the expectations of criminologists, many of whom warned of an uptick as the economy slowed after 1999.
The numbers are a boon for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who is likely to point to them as one of the concrete achievements of his administration as he runs for re-election next year, and for his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly.
The drop comes despite the fact that the New York City Police Department is somewhat smaller than it was at times during the last 10 years, down to 37,000 from roughly 40,000, and the fact that the department is focused on preventing terrorism in addition to fighting crime.
Still, some say New Yorkers have come to expect an ever-safer city even as that becomes harder to provide. The declines are inevitably slowing, and Compstat, the Police Department's vaunted and imitated accountability system, has in effect made the department a victim of its own success by focusing on percentage drops from one year to the next.
In 2001, the newspaper columnist Jack Newfield suggested that a homicide count below 600 would be worth a ticker tape parade. If things stay on course, 2004 will be the third year in a row that the city has met that goal.
"The good news is how far we've come, and the disappointing part is that we can't seem to go much lower than this number," said Andrew Karmen, a sociologist who has extensively analyzed the factors affecting New York's crime rate, from drug use and unemployment to the size of the police force.
Even Commissioner Kelly acknowledged yesterday that there was a limit to crime reduction.
"There's always unfortunately going to be a core number of homicides that law enforcement can't do very much about," he said.
The numbers bear this out - the percentage of killings that happen on the street has gone down, to 33 percent from 40 percent last year, while the percentage in homes and housing projects has increased slightly, according to a new Police Department homicide and shooting database maintained by the Deputy Commissioner of Operations, Garry F. McCarthy.
Mr. Kelly attributes much of the decline in homicide to the increasingly precise deployment of resources. Operation Impact, for example, pinpoints the city's most troubled blocks and floods them with uniformed officers and anticrime squads.
"Our homicides are down in the domestic violence area, down as far as gang-related incidents are concerned," he said yesterday. "Impact focuses on those areas where you have that gang activity."
This is true. I don't expect my neighborhood's murder rate to go down much, as it's almost at zero.
He was referring to 9/11, which was an act of war, not a crime.
Oh, no! What the NYC-haters going to do? They'll find something to bitch about anyway.
Oh sure, New York City's a fine place to be...IF YOU WANNA GET MURDERED!!!
Obviously, you did not read the article.
That said, I doubt that much of the decline has to do with fudging of statistics by precinct commanders. Some might have been changed, but keep in mind that the FBI audits all police statistics twice a year. And murder, the barometer for measuring most crime rates, is VERY hard to downgrade.
Some of it might have to do with the improved quality of medical care, but assaults (which includes attempted, and therefore prevented, murder), and therefore shootings, are also down.
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