I’ve never heard such uniformity in belief from police officers that crime is going to go up in New York City. Why with stop, question, and frisks down and a liberal mayor in charge, it’s almost like they want crime to go up just so they can say, “we told you so” and reminisce about the good ol’ days of Giuliani (when crime was, by the way — though going down rapidly — much higher).
Perhaps a level of fear and oppression is lifting from parts of the city… I don’t know. Perhaps that is good. Perhaps it will lead to wilding and chaos. I don’t know. But until crime does go up… when the next Compstat report is publicly released it will show it was a bad week in NYC, with 9 murders. This will negate much of the year’s improvement over last year. And winter was indeed very cold.
So it would be nice to get through a long hot summer before stating with confidence that crime isn’t going up. And if crime does go up in New York, let’s keep the focus on police tactics and police citizen interaction and not blame the usual gobbledygook of liberal “root causes.” (If the crime drop in the 1990s showed anything, it’s that crime can plummet independently of improved social and economic conditions. Poverty can make you miserable; it does not turn you into a mugger.).
Regardless, right now crime is not going up. So until it does, it seems silly to run around like Chicken Little saying the sky is falling.