Because it's not the only city were less violent police behavior led to lower crime rates.
We Were Wrong about Stop-and-Frisk
Like many conservatives, I had grave concerns about curtailing the New York City police department’s controversial tactic of stopping and frisking potential suspects for weapons. I was inclined to defer to the police when they protested that they needed the option to stop, question, and frisk New Yorkers on a mere reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing instead of probable cause that the targeted person had committed a crime. Restricting the tactic, I thought, would cause an uptick, maybe even a spike, in crime rates. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who made ending stop-and-frisk the centerpiece of his successful 2013 campaign for mayor, struck me as a man who was cynically willing to tolerate an increase in crime if he thought it to his political advantage to amplify leftist voters’ core belief that policing was out of control.
Today in New York City, use of stop-and-frisk, which the department justified via the 1968 Terry v. Ohio Supreme Court ruling, has crashed. Yet the statistics are clear: Crime is lower than ever. It’s possible that crime would be even lower had stop-and-frisk been retained, but that’s moving the goalposts. I and others argued that crime would rise. Instead, it fell. We were wrong.
Major crime in New York City has continued to decline almost across the board in the four years of the de Blasio administration, to the lowest rates since New York City began keeping extensive records on crime in the early 1960s. Crime is literally off the charts — the low end of the charts. To compare today’s crime rate to even that of ten years ago is to observe a breathtaking decline.
New York City & Stop-and-Frisk: Crime Decline Shows Conservatives Were Wrong | National Review
Turns out, if police act like thugs, citizens tend to react in kind. If they stop acting like thugs, fewer citizens do.
So it seems likely that the sharp declines that began under Bloomberg would have continued if Bloomberg had remained in office.
Police brass are investigating claims by a veteran captain who alleges that some NYPD commanders are misclassifying felonies to hold down crime statistics in a bid to further their careers.
Capt. Marash Vucinaj has gathered 156 cases over the past two years from multiple commands that he contends show a pattern of downgrading some felony-level crimes to misdemeanors. The crimes include thefts and attempted thefts, assaults and assaults on cops. He does not claim the manipulation extends to murders and rapes.
Among the methods he claims he has seen:
- Classifying incidents where cops are injured by suspects as resisting arrest, rather than assault.
- Classifying grand larcenies as lost property and ignoring details that suggest a crime took place.
- Classifying incidents where someone purposefully shot at someone but missed as “investigate shots fired,” reckless endangerment or criminal mischief.
- Classifying incidents where a would-be thief slipped his hand into someone’s pocket or bag as misdemeanor “jostling” rather than attempted grand larceny.
- Compressing several crimes with separate victims into one complaint report.
- Failing to record crimes in the city handled by other law enforcement agencies.
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nypd-probes-claims-cops-fudging-crime-stats-article-1.3730078
Don’t Take the Wrong Lessons from NYC’s Murder Drop
By
Heather Mac Donald
Cop critics who assiduously ignored the 20 percent increase in the national homicide rate over the previous two years have suddenly become enthusiastic purveyors of crime statistics. Fueling their newfound interest in crime data is the announcement that the
New York City homicide rate is at a near-60-year low. That homicide drop shows that proactive policing is irrelevant to crime levels, say these policing skeptics. The New York Police Department’s reported-stop activity plummeted earlier in this decade as a result of a groundless trilogy of racial-profiling lawsuits against the department. Yet crime in New York ultimately continued its downward trajectory. Therefore, proactive policing like pedestrian stops is unnecessary, these cop critics say.
Their arguments are specious.
New York City’s formerly high-crime neighborhoods have experienced a stunning degree of gentrification over the last 15 years, thanks to the proactive-policing-induced conquest of crime. It is that gentrification which is now helping fuel the ongoing crime drop. Urban hipsters are flocking to areas that once were the purview of drug dealers and pimps, trailing in their wake legitimate commerce and street life, which further attracts law-abiding activity and residents in a virtuous cycle of increasing public safety. The degree of demographic change is startling. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, the number of white residents rose 1,235 percent from 2000 to 2015, while the black population decreased by 17 percent, reports City Lab. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, the number of whites rose 610 percent over that same decade and a half; the black population was down 22 percent. Central Harlem’s white population rose 846 percent; the black share dropped 10 percent. The Brooklyn Navy Yards has now been declared the next cool place to be by the tech industry. Business owners are moving their residences as well as their enterprises to the area.
This demographic transformation has enormous implications for crime. A black New Yorker is 50 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker, according to perpetrator identifications provided to the police by witnesses to, and victims of, those shootings. Those victims are overwhelmingly minority themselves. When the racial balance of a neighborhood changes radically, given those crime disparities, its violent-crime rate will as well. (This racial crime disparity reflects the breakdown of the black family and the high percentage of black males — upwards of 80 percent in some neighborhoods — being raised by single mothers.)
The high-crime areas of Baltimore and Chicago have not been gentrified. Baltimore is experiencing its highest per capita murder rate for the third year in a row. While Chicago’s homicide numbers are down somewhat this year, thanks to the aggressive use of shot-spotter technology, they remain at a level far higher than in the past decade. The year 2017 will mark only the second time since 2003 that homicides surpassed 600, according to the
Chicago Tribune. The de-policing that hit Baltimore and Chicago in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Freddie Gray Baltimore riots, and the protests over the shooting in Chicago of Laquan McDonald has not been counteracted by significant demographic change, unlike in New York City. Law-abiding residents of Baltimore and Chicago’s high-crime areas remain dependent on the police to maintain order. Unfortunately, the Baltimore Police Department will be even harder pressed to provide that order, thanks to a federal consent decree finalized in the last week of the Obama administration. That consent decree puts crippling bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of low-level public-order enforcement, such as the enforcement of loitering and trespass laws. Residents of high-crime areas
beg the police to clear their corners of miscreants, but the officers’ hands are tied. U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions rightly sought a delay in the implementation of the Baltimore consent decree, but the federal judge overseeing the case denied his request. Baltimore’s law-abiding poor citizens will just have to hope for some other form of intervention.
The claim that proactive policing is a useless crime-fighting strategy ignores a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences. An overwhelmingly liberal group of criminologists concluded that stop, question, and frisk shows statistically significant short-term crime-reduction effects; the long-term effects have not been measured. Hot-spots policing, often just another name for stop, question, and frisk, also produces statistically significant crime-reduction effects, according to experimental evidence. No other policing strategies assessed by the NAS team produced more powerful results. If, after two decades of proactive-policing enabled gentrification, New York has maintained its crime drop despite the drop in documented stops, that doesn’t mean that places like Chicago and Baltimore can do without such interventions. Stops in Chicago dropped 82 percent in 2016; there were 4,300 people shot there last year, overwhelmingly black, or one person every two hours.
New York City Homicide Rate Drop Lessons for Proactive Policing | National Review
