Colleen Long has the story in the Washington Post.
Homicides are down. They’re on pace for 457 this year, which would be lower than the many-decade low of 497 in 2007. Very impressive. Thank you, NYPD!
This is all the more impressive since, as Patrick McGeehan reports in the New York Times, unemployment hit 10.3% in New York City, a 16-year high. Sixteen years ago, in 1993, there were 1,960 murders in the city. Take that, “root causes.”
An op-ed by Tony Newman in the New York Daily News.
While New York has a reputation as a tolerant and open-minded city and New York State effectively decriminalized simple possession of up to 25 grams of marijuana more than 30 years ago, Gotham has made so many pot arrests that it now has the unfortunate distinction of being the marijuana arrest capital of the world.
…
Prior to 1997, the lowest-level marijuana arrests were 1% of all arrests in the city. Since 1997, marijuana arrests have averaged 10% of all arrests in the city.If possession of marijuana is supposed to be decriminalized in New York, how does this happen? Often because, in the course of interacting with the police, individuals may be asked to empty their pockets, which results in the pot being “open to public view” – which is, technically, a crime.
New York City’s marijuana arrests show stark racial disparities. In 2008, 87% of those charged with pot possession were black or Latino. These groups represent only about half of the city’s population, and U.S. government surveys consistently find that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than blacks and Latinos. Yet blacks and Latinos are arrested for pot at much higher rates, in part because officers make stop-and-frisks disproportionately in black, Latino and low-income neighborhoods.
Read more.
The New York Times has a nice map of homicides in the city. You can select by various variables, but unfortunately not more than one at a time.
The Baltimore Sun has a similar but better map.
I’m always a bit surprised by just how few white homicide victims there are. Or, conversely, how many of the victims are minority. In NYC since 2003 there are about 43 white homicide victims per year out of a population of about 3,700,000. That’s a very low homicide rate of 1.16 per 100,000. That’s a lower rate than Canada!
Among blacks in NYC, there are about 329 homicide victims a year and 2,240,000 people. That’s a homicide rate of 14.7.
Meanwhile in Baltimore, in 2007, there were 14 white homicide victims (a rate of about 7) and 252 black victims (a rate of about 60).
Update: I crunched a few more numbers because, well, I’m curious.
Overall in the U.S. rate is about 5.6 per 100,000. It’s about 3.3 for whites and 20 for blacks.
Many other countries have homicide rates under 1. Most civilized countries have rates under 2. We don’t even come close. But America has always been a violent place. I guess the real question is why is white New York City so non-homicidal?
And in talking about race and crime, I feel compelled to mention gender and crime. Murder really is a guy thing. In NYC just 8% of murderers (and 17% of victims) are women. And most of those are domestic situations. What is it about men? Can’t we all just get along?
New York City Police Department advises all Shield members regarding a military aircraft flyover that will occur on May 20, 2009 at 11:45 a.m. The flyover is part of the Fleet Week festivities and will include four military planes flying over New York City at a low altitude.
At approximately 11:45 a.m., four F-18 Hornets will pass over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge at an altitude of 2000 feet. The aircrafts will then turn and follow the Hudson River north over the assembled fleet while decreasing their altitude to 1000 feet. When the F-18s reach Pier 90, they will climb to 2500 feet and higher, exiting New York City airspace over the George Washington Bridge.
Christine Hauser reportsin the New York Times that the NYPD made 171,094 stops in the first three months of 2009.
Unlike many, I don’t think stop and frisks are inherently bad (not all that were stopped were frisked, though I’m sure many were). I’m willing to concede that aggressive stop and frisks most likely contributed to making New York a much less violent city.
BUT… there’s a big difference between a smart officer with reasonable suspicion making a stop because he or she is suspicious and a lazy officer making a stop because he or she needs to meet an arrest quota and can kind of B.S. the reasonable suspicion needed to justify the stop. You stop enough people and one will eventually be wanted on a warrant.
We can (and should) debate if stop and frisks are necessary and effective. But I don’t think that even the NYPD would argue that badstop and frisks are good. If an officer can’t naturally make an arrest and write a few citations a month in a high-crime district, it’s probably better to have that officer do not much at all.
A quota doesn’t teach officers to police smarter. Quotas don’t make good officers work more. Quotas don’t effect good police. Quotas make not-so-good police officers police more. They make lazy or bad officers do more lazy or bad things. And bad stop and frisks piss people off who should and otherwise would be supporting police.
Instead of worrying about the number of stop and frisks, we should worry about the quality of stop and frisks. That’s harder to quantify. But deemphasizing “productivity stats” is a good place to start.
This time in New York.
The fallacy of gun-control (and I say this as a supporter of gun control) is that it never answers the question: how do you get the gun out of the hands of the criminal? Passing more feel-good laws is not the answer. Laws don’t make you safer. You need observanceof laws. And criminals are not partial to observing laws.
That being said, anybody who thinks there is no possible good in any kind of law that restrict or regulates guns in any way is, well, crazy.
Len Levitt’s NYPD Confidential talks more about the fly-over fiasco.
Al Baker reports in the Times:
Any officer stopping a person in the street must tell the person “the reason, or reasons, why it occurred,” according to a letter from Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. The policy took effect April 23, according to a departmental order to revise the police patrol guide.
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Street stops jumped to 508,540 in 2006, from 97,296 in 2002, according to data from the police, and reached 531,159 last year, the most on record.
Anonymous posted a comment on the previous post: I can’t wait for the fudged numbers of the NYPD Comp-stat to be exposed…”
Boy, there sure is a lot of chatter about the fudged numbers in the NYPD (and I’m talking about chatter from NYPD officers). I didn’t hear this nearly so much even just a few years ago. It seems that downgrading crime is becoming part of NYPD culture. And that’s a shame because it takes away from the hard work of the NYPD in actually decreasing crime.
But I don’t believe the homicide numbers are fudged. According to the latest official crime stats (week of 4/13/09 to 4/19/09), there have been 109 murders this year compared to 142 at this time last year. That’s a 23 percent drop. That’s a real drop. That’s not playing fast and loose with the numbers. That’s saving lives.
And if the other numbers go down in sync, the drop is probably real even if the numbers aren’t. Sure, maybe felony assault and grand larcenies are a lower than reality would indicate. But if you think about it, as long as the errors are consistent month to month and year to year, those errors don’t have much of an effect. The shame is that any effort put into lowering stats is kind of wasted because you have to keep cooking just to keep even. Once you start cooking the books, you can’t stop. At least not without what will look like a big one-time increase in crime.
To police officers I offer this bit of unsolicited advice: call it like you see it. Nobody can make youdowngrade crime. Except when they do. Then write the facts as you believe them in the narrative and keep a separate list of notes documenting when, where, and who ordered you to do what.
If the books are being cooked, one day it will boil over in scandal (and until then it chips away at a culture of honesty and integrity). And when the shit does hit the fan, the brass will cover theirs while throwing a few others under the bus.
They’ll be covering theirs; you need to cover yours.
The story in the Daily News:
The city’s crime rate for the first three months of 2009 was the lowest in more than 40 years, defying fears that the sinking economy might send the city back into the bad old days of rampant murders and rough streets.
Through the end of last month, overall crime dropped 13.5% from a year ago – down in every major category, including homicides, with 89, according to daily crime statistics from police. Last year, there were 116 homicides during the same period.
Robberies were also down from 4,837 last year at this time to 4,131 this year, and grand larcenies dropped from 10,030 to 8,854.
“I know there’s an anticipation … that crime would go up as a result of the economic turndown. We just haven’t experienced that,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Friday.