8 ms·

NYC Homicides Drop Sharply, Again

64 points by GabrielF00 13y ago

pdog 13y ago
I wonder how much of the drop in crime rates can be attributed to Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn increasingly becoming a haven for the superrich and poorer people being priced out. An "outsize share" of the violence is in East New York, Brooklyn, and South Jamaica, Queen.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  Probably some of it, but probably not a lot. The very poor are not actually priced out of NYC. NYC heavily taxes the middle class and rich in order to pay certain poor people to remain in the city (including very desirable areas). The main people being priced out are the middle class, not the poor.
  - m0th87 13y ago
    To be fair, you don't just apply and you're in. You have to be in an industry the city wants to grow, and even then it's a bit of a lottery, highly dependent on how long you've lived in the City. The absurdity of it though is that you can stay in the subsidized housing program long after you switch industries and make bank.
    - hollerith 13y ago
      >The absurdity of it though is that you can stay in the subsidized housing program long after you switch industries and make bank. My guess is that that is a side effect of the fact that you can stay in your subsidized apartment long after you switch industries and make bank. That does not seem that absurd to me: in general, Americans are too rootless, so a policy that incentivizes some people to continue to have the same neighbors seems worth some amount of divergence from "perfect economic justice" or whatever you want to call it.
      - yummyfajitas 13y ago
        Why is it beneficial to subsidize people having the same neighbors? Roots cause unemployment, since they make people less likely to move to a new job. If anything, we should be taxing the stationary rather than subsidizing them.
        pessimizer 13y ago
        Roots also cause community, and make people more likely to organize to protect and improve the conditions of the place where they live. edit: As a simple illustration, I am a typical single, firmly middle class professional who lives in a neighborhood that I have no connection to, is nowhere near any of my family, and I know maybe one or two of my neighbors by name. If the city decided that it wanted to dump all of its garbage in the middle of my street, end rodent control, fire, and police protection in my neighborhood, and add heavy metals to the water, I would just move to a place where they weren't doing that, and leave the people who couldn't afford to to rot. As one of the members of the top 10% in household incomes, I could conceivably keep doing that until 90% of the populace was mutating in a nuclear wasteland, and I was reduced to a shitty studio apartment for $6000/mo in the outskirts of a walled community guarded by our private paramilitary massacre-rape squad, which periodically makes incursions into the wasteland to seize kitschy furniture to sell to us on the inside.
        hollerith 13y ago
        >Roots cause unemployment, since they make people less likely to move to a new job That's true, but unemployment is not a huge problem in the US compared to problems like addiction and father-less children which are made worse by rootlessness. In other words, the genius of America is how it removes barriers to people's becoming economically productive and following individual visions, but it is possible to take that spirit too far, particularly in domains like subsidized housing for poor people. For most of the last 2 million years, most people were surrounded by the same people all their lives, and interactions with strangers were rare. Although it is necessary for most of us to diverge from that ancestral way of life to maintain what we have achieved as a civilization, diverging too much causes social pathologies, particularly addiction. Someone very close to me has spent the last 18 years in a subsidized apartment building for poor people in the Bay Area. Half of this person's neighbors are the same people as when he moved in 18 years ago. There is value in that. There is more to maintaining a healthy society that young people pulling up roots to move to the Bay Area to do fearsomely economically-productive things with computers, young people moving to Cambridge, MA, to become research scientists and young people obtaining law degrees and moving to Washington, DC, to gain enough influence to inject some wisdom and sanity into our government. In particular, there is a "social fabric" that can become diseased by too much emphasis on individual freedom and economic efficiency.
  - simonholroyd 13y ago
    Priced out, but apparently also losing jobs while lower incomes gained jobs: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/up/51308385 http://video.msnbc.msn.com/up/51308385 I agree with you I don't think the income gap is the cause of lower crime. Also these crime rates are dropping absolutely not per capita, right? Is there any data to show that the actual population of lower income (or even middle income) residents has dropped? All the news focuses on the variance in income distribution. NYC could be getting richer while still taking in more low income residents.
    - newsum 13y ago
      you really believe NYC is taking in more low income residents? Exactly where are they moving into? Remember, they destroyed a couple blocks of section 8 housing to build the new Brooklyn Nets arena.
  - king_jester 13y ago
    It's really difficult to get into section 8 housing and private developers have been snatching up rent stabilized and controlled apts as much as possible, renovating them to end the rent price controls, and then putting them back on the market. There's also considerable desire to buy and develop new condos on properties that used to house lower rent apts. To that end, the very poor are priced out since they are unlikely to get section 8 and are more likely to see an existing apt they have got bought out and/or get the priced raised.
- skizo18 13y ago
  Well that is a very cynical way to look at it; you should remember that overall crime rate has been dropping for a couple decades now.
- brown9-2 13y ago
  I don't think that trend has sped up considerably since 2012 to affect such a large drop in the year over year number.
- rm999 13y ago
  The poverty rate has been going up in NYC as the crime rate has been going down: http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2012/sep/20/new-york-city-poverty-rate-third-year-row/ http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2012/sep/20/new-york-...
  - nazgulnarsil 13y ago
    the quality of life of someone living in poverty has been increasing.
- newsum 13y ago
  cannot agree more. in my opinion, regardless of the statistics drop in crime is primarily attributed to exuberant increase of the cost of living especially in the historically impoverished neighborhoods from the 1980s and on. (i.e. Bushwick, Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant etc...)
gnosis 13y ago
There was a very interesting article[1] recently about the epidemiological link between leaded gasoline and crime. [1] - http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  There's also the link between abortion legalization and the subsequent drop in crime, mentioned in Freakonomics.
  - nhebb 13y ago
    The Mother Jones article addresses that. You should read it. It's an interesting theory.
  - specialist 13y ago
    The leaded gasoline theory better explains observations (gathered data). The abortion rights theory is still very interesting, and worth discussion, but leaded gasoline is currently more right, to be amended and supplanted as we learn more. Science!
    - thorum 13y ago
      Steven Pinker argues that since the separation between the cause (lead exposure in childhood) and effect (criminal behavior in adulthood) is so wide, there are almost certainly big confounding variables that we haven't considered. > There are reasons to be skeptical of any claim based on correlations between such widely separated variables as lead exposure (the cause) and crime (the effect). Consuming lead does not instantly turn someone i nto a criminal in the way that consuming vitamin C cures scurvy. It affects the child’s developing brain, which makes the child duller and more impulsive, which, in some children, and under the right circumstances, leads them to grow up to make short - sight ed and risky choices, which, in some children and under the right circumstances, leads them to commit crimes, which, if enough young people act in the same way and at the same time, affects the crime rate. The lead hypothesis correlates the first and last link in this chain, but it would be more convincing if there were evidence about the intervening links. source - http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_on_lead_removal_and_declining_crime.pdf http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_o...
olympus 13y ago
Everyone is so quick to try to assign cause to any phenomenon. I'm going to remind everyone that correlation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causation, and there is often a significant time difference between the cause and the effect. I'm not saying that the stop and frisk tactics did or didn't work, but saying that stop and frisk wasn't the cause because stop and frisks were lower in this time period isn't valid. Maybe the increased stop and frisks in 2012 got the criminals off the street that were going to commit murders in 2013. Again, I'm not saying that stop and frisk is a good or legal idea, but the argument that some people are using to dismiss it is a flawed argument and needs some more work.
pinaceae 13y ago
419 murders in 2012 in NYC, 154 in 2013 already. London had 99 murders in 2012.
- chaz 13y ago
  When did this become a contest?
  - emiliobumachar 13y ago
    I can't make sense of crime statistics except when comparing either different times (article), or different places (your parent comment)
  - geogra4 13y ago
    NYC's extremely low murder rate for a big city in the USA is really nothing special compared to other major cities world wide. I think the context is useful in comparison.
- mikeash 13y ago
  The USA's murder rate is about 4x the UK's, so it's no big surprise that any given city's rate might be about 4x as well.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- bluedino 13y ago
  Chicago had 532 murders in 2012. With 1/3rd the population of NYC
ThomPete 13y ago
One word...gentrification.
vacri 13y ago
While the reduction is indeed something to be pleased about, remember that in criminology, it's not unusual to see blips like this. It might be a blip, or it might be the start of a new trend. Too early to tell.
- Sanddancer 13y ago
  This has been a very long running trend here. Since 1990, crime in US cities in general has been dropping like a rock.
  - vacri 13y ago
    Absolutely, but they haven't been dropping 25% every year. You still get short-term rises and falls on long-term trends.
chaz 13y ago
To provide a little bit of historical perspective on NYC's murders: 1990: 2,262 1993: 1,927 1998: 629 2001: 649 2012: 417 2013: 145 YTD http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cscity.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/...
- larrys 13y ago
  Would be interesting if numbers were available to see what happened in terms of the number of people assigned to homicide division. Did they remain the same (meaning they can spend more time say on each crime) or did they go down?
  - jbooth 13y ago
    The homicide division doesn't prevent murders, they solve them. People generally credit methodology changes under the term 'community policing' for the turn-around. Basically, the idea is that rather than just riding in, cracking skulls, slapping cuffs on once a night, engage with the community more, address more stuff like noise complaints and vandalism, to build relations with the community and coincidentally crack down on the same troublemakers a lot of the time. In theory (and in practice), it turns out to be more effective at stopping crime from happening than the deterrent factor of riding in lights blazing every night. (This isn't to say that NYC cops are perfect or that stop-and-frisk doesn't happen all the damn time, just outlining the general theory behind community policing)
    - jn 13y ago
      > The homicide division doesn't prevent murders, they solve them. I don't think larrys was suggesting otherwise, just that it'd be interesting to know if the homicide division was reduced in line with the homicide rate. Similarly, what has happened to the percentage of cases being solved and successfully prosecuted? > 'community policing' [...] turns out to be more effective at stopping crime It's known as "policing by consent" by the British, where officers are meant to follow the "Peelian Principles" from 1829 [1] Of particular relevance here: 2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions. 3. Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public. 4. The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force. 9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it. [1] http://independentpolicecommission.org.uk/peelian-principles http://independentpolicecommission.org.uk/peelian-principles
drpgq 13y ago
"Police officials also credited their efforts at identifying and monitoring abusive husbands whose behavior seemed poised to turn lethal." I found that interesting. I always felt that for domestics there wasn't a lot you could do, but I guess that's not the case.
specialist 13y ago
Apparently at least some of the crime statistics have been fudged. The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation http://www.amazon.com/The-Crime-Numbers-Game-Manipulation/dp/1439810311 http://www.amazon.com/The-Crime-Numbers-Game-Manipulation/dp... So now I don't know what to believe. My guess is that violent crime has gone down, but not as fast as the police depts have reported.
- chaz 13y ago
  This American Life did a story about this [1] not too long ago, and featured an officer who recorded conversations from NYPD supervisors instructing officers to downgrade or not report crimes so the precinct looked better. There's also another story about the use of CompStat in the NYT. [2] For the context of this post, however, I think it's fair to assume that murders are getting pretty accurately reported, since it's hard to downgrade or not report a murder. [1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/right-to-remain-silent http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/r... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/29/nyregion/new-york-police-department-manipulates-crime-reports-study-finds.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/29/nyregion/new-york-police-d...
- GabrielF00 13y ago
  David Simon of The Wire has talked about this. You can fudge statistics for things like robbery, burglary, rape, etc. by reporting them as lesser crimes or otherwise making them go away, but it's much more difficult to fudge the stats when it comes to murder, because murders are so visible.
  - specialist 13y ago
    I don't remember where I heard this, but one journalist/investigator compared crime reports with hospital admissions and bodies in the morgue. They didn't match, eg underreporting. The most extreme example I've heard is Disney World in Florida, where the body is removed from the premises (jurisdiction) before a report is filed, so they can keep the fatality counts down.
- rwhitman 13y ago
zeroexzeroone 13y ago
Runs faster in memory, allegedly.
bluedino 13y ago
What's the drug scene like in New York these days? First you had heroin, then the rise of crack cocaine, but since then the murder rate has gone lower and lower (early 90's) There's a very close link between the drug trade and inner-city murders.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  This is an insightful post. The numbers posted above start at 1990 which was the tail-end of the decades of heroin, cocaine and crack epidemics in NYC. It looks like crime is back down towards a rate similar to 1965: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm Not sure about the exactness of these statistics, just a quick google result that seems legit.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    What the hell was this zeroed for? There is absolutely nothing in this post that is factually incorrect or presented in an offensive manner. HN really should show who's voting on posts.
    - lostlogin 13y ago
      I'm with you on that. Or it should force someone to comment if your down voting, but that has notable drawbacks when a comment is just plain inflammatory.
yoster 13y ago
1993 was pretty gangster all over the country...
zaroth 13y ago
Buried in the 2nd to last paragraph: "The program relies heavily on tracking the online activities of neighborhood gangs, in effect, trying to prevent shootings before they happen."

64 points by GabrielF00 13y ago

pdog 13y ago

I wonder how much of the drop in crime rates can be attributed to Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn increasingly becoming a haven for the superrich and poorer people being priced out. An "outsize share" of the violence is in East New York, Brooklyn, and South Jamaica, Queen.

yummyfajitas 13y ago
Probably some of it, but probably not a lot. The very poor are not actually priced out of NYC. NYC heavily taxes the middle class and rich in order to pay certain poor people to remain in the city (including very desirable areas). The main people being priced out are the middle class, not the poor.
- m0th87 13y ago
  To be fair, you don't just apply and you're in. You have to be in an industry the city wants to grow, and even then it's a bit of a lottery, highly dependent on how long you've lived in the City. The absurdity of it though is that you can stay in the subsidized housing program long after you switch industries and make bank.
  - hollerith 13y ago
    >The absurdity of it though is that you can stay in the subsidized housing program long after you switch industries and make bank. My guess is that that is a side effect of the fact that you can stay in your subsidized apartment long after you switch industries and make bank. That does not seem that absurd to me: in general, Americans are too rootless, so a policy that incentivizes some people to continue to have the same neighbors seems worth some amount of divergence from "perfect economic justice" or whatever you want to call it.
    - yummyfajitas 13y ago
      Why is it beneficial to subsidize people having the same neighbors? Roots cause unemployment, since they make people less likely to move to a new job. If anything, we should be taxing the stationary rather than subsidizing them.
      - pessimizer 13y ago
        Roots also cause community, and make people more likely to organize to protect and improve the conditions of the place where they live. edit: As a simple illustration, I am a typical single, firmly middle class professional who lives in a neighborhood that I have no connection to, is nowhere near any of my family, and I know maybe one or two of my neighbors by name. If the city decided that it wanted to dump all of its garbage in the middle of my street, end rodent control, fire, and police protection in my neighborhood, and add heavy metals to the water, I would just move to a place where they weren't doing that, and leave the people who couldn't afford to to rot. As one of the members of the top 10% in household incomes, I could conceivably keep doing that until 90% of the populace was mutating in a nuclear wasteland, and I was reduced to a shitty studio apartment for $6000/mo in the outskirts of a walled community guarded by our private paramilitary massacre-rape squad, which periodically makes incursions into the wasteland to seize kitschy furniture to sell to us on the inside.
      - hollerith 13y ago
        >Roots cause unemployment, since they make people less likely to move to a new job That's true, but unemployment is not a huge problem in the US compared to problems like addiction and father-less children which are made worse by rootlessness. In other words, the genius of America is how it removes barriers to people's becoming economically productive and following individual visions, but it is possible to take that spirit too far, particularly in domains like subsidized housing for poor people. For most of the last 2 million years, most people were surrounded by the same people all their lives, and interactions with strangers were rare. Although it is necessary for most of us to diverge from that ancestral way of life to maintain what we have achieved as a civilization, diverging too much causes social pathologies, particularly addiction. Someone very close to me has spent the last 18 years in a subsidized apartment building for poor people in the Bay Area. Half of this person's neighbors are the same people as when he moved in 18 years ago. There is value in that. There is more to maintaining a healthy society that young people pulling up roots to move to the Bay Area to do fearsomely economically-productive things with computers, young people moving to Cambridge, MA, to become research scientists and young people obtaining law degrees and moving to Washington, DC, to gain enough influence to inject some wisdom and sanity into our government. In particular, there is a "social fabric" that can become diseased by too much emphasis on individual freedom and economic efficiency.
- simonholroyd 13y ago
  Priced out, but apparently also losing jobs while lower incomes gained jobs: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/up/51308385 http://video.msnbc.msn.com/up/51308385 I agree with you I don't think the income gap is the cause of lower crime. Also these crime rates are dropping absolutely not per capita, right? Is there any data to show that the actual population of lower income (or even middle income) residents has dropped? All the news focuses on the variance in income distribution. NYC could be getting richer while still taking in more low income residents.
  - newsum 13y ago
    you really believe NYC is taking in more low income residents? Exactly where are they moving into? Remember, they destroyed a couple blocks of section 8 housing to build the new Brooklyn Nets arena.
- king_jester 13y ago
  It's really difficult to get into section 8 housing and private developers have been snatching up rent stabilized and controlled apts as much as possible, renovating them to end the rent price controls, and then putting them back on the market. There's also considerable desire to buy and develop new condos on properties that used to house lower rent apts. To that end, the very poor are priced out since they are unlikely to get section 8 and are more likely to see an existing apt they have got bought out and/or get the priced raised.
skizo18 13y ago
Well that is a very cynical way to look at it; you should remember that overall crime rate has been dropping for a couple decades now.
brown9-2 13y ago
I don't think that trend has sped up considerably since 2012 to affect such a large drop in the year over year number.
rm999 13y ago
The poverty rate has been going up in NYC as the crime rate has been going down: http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2012/sep/20/new-york-city-poverty-rate-third-year-row/ http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2012/sep/20/new-york-...
- nazgulnarsil 13y ago
  the quality of life of someone living in poverty has been increasing.
newsum 13y ago
cannot agree more. in my opinion, regardless of the statistics drop in crime is primarily attributed to exuberant increase of the cost of living especially in the historically impoverished neighborhoods from the 1980s and on. (i.e. Bushwick, Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant etc...)

gnosis 13y ago

There was a very interesting article[1] recently about the epidemiological link between leaded gasoline and crime. [1] - http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

w1ntermute 13y ago
There's also the link between abortion legalization and the subsequent drop in crime, mentioned in Freakonomics.
- nhebb 13y ago
  The Mother Jones article addresses that. You should read it. It's an interesting theory.
- specialist 13y ago
  The leaded gasoline theory better explains observations (gathered data). The abortion rights theory is still very interesting, and worth discussion, but leaded gasoline is currently more right, to be amended and supplanted as we learn more. Science!
  - thorum 13y ago
    Steven Pinker argues that since the separation between the cause (lead exposure in childhood) and effect (criminal behavior in adulthood) is so wide, there are almost certainly big confounding variables that we haven't considered. > There are reasons to be skeptical of any claim based on correlations between such widely separated variables as lead exposure (the cause) and crime (the effect). Consuming lead does not instantly turn someone i nto a criminal in the way that consuming vitamin C cures scurvy. It affects the child’s developing brain, which makes the child duller and more impulsive, which, in some children, and under the right circumstances, leads them to grow up to make short - sight ed and risky choices, which, in some children and under the right circumstances, leads them to commit crimes, which, if enough young people act in the same way and at the same time, affects the crime rate. The lead hypothesis correlates the first and last link in this chain, but it would be more convincing if there were evidence about the intervening links. source - http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_on_lead_removal_and_declining_crime.pdf http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_o...

olympus 13y ago

Everyone is so quick to try to assign cause to any phenomenon. I'm going to remind everyone that correlation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causation, and there is often a significant time difference between the cause and the effect. I'm not saying that the stop and frisk tactics did or didn't work, but saying that stop and frisk wasn't the cause because stop and frisks were lower in this time period isn't valid. Maybe the increased stop and frisks in 2012 got the criminals off the street that were going to commit murders in 2013. Again, I'm not saying that stop and frisk is a good or legal idea, but the argument that some people are using to dismiss it is a flawed argument and needs some more work.

pinaceae 13y ago

419 murders in 2012 in NYC, 154 in 2013 already. London had 99 murders in 2012.

chaz 13y ago
When did this become a contest?
- emiliobumachar 13y ago
  I can't make sense of crime statistics except when comparing either different times (article), or different places (your parent comment)
- geogra4 13y ago
  NYC's extremely low murder rate for a big city in the USA is really nothing special compared to other major cities world wide. I think the context is useful in comparison.
mikeash 13y ago
The USA's murder rate is about 4x the UK's, so it's no big surprise that any given city's rate might be about 4x as well.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bluedino 13y ago
Chicago had 532 murders in 2012. With 1/3rd the population of NYC

ThomPete 13y ago

One word...gentrification.

vacri 13y ago

While the reduction is indeed something to be pleased about, remember that in criminology, it's not unusual to see blips like this. It might be a blip, or it might be the start of a new trend. Too early to tell.

Sanddancer 13y ago
This has been a very long running trend here. Since 1990, crime in US cities in general has been dropping like a rock.
- vacri 13y ago
  Absolutely, but they haven't been dropping 25% every year. You still get short-term rises and falls on long-term trends.

chaz 13y ago

To provide a little bit of historical perspective on NYC's murders: 1990: 2,262 1993: 1,927 1998: 629 2001: 649 2012: 417 2013: 145 YTD http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cscity.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/...

larrys 13y ago
Would be interesting if numbers were available to see what happened in terms of the number of people assigned to homicide division. Did they remain the same (meaning they can spend more time say on each crime) or did they go down?
- jbooth 13y ago
  The homicide division doesn't prevent murders, they solve them. People generally credit methodology changes under the term 'community policing' for the turn-around. Basically, the idea is that rather than just riding in, cracking skulls, slapping cuffs on once a night, engage with the community more, address more stuff like noise complaints and vandalism, to build relations with the community and coincidentally crack down on the same troublemakers a lot of the time. In theory (and in practice), it turns out to be more effective at stopping crime from happening than the deterrent factor of riding in lights blazing every night. (This isn't to say that NYC cops are perfect or that stop-and-frisk doesn't happen all the damn time, just outlining the general theory behind community policing)
  - jn 13y ago
    > The homicide division doesn't prevent murders, they solve them. I don't think larrys was suggesting otherwise, just that it'd be interesting to know if the homicide division was reduced in line with the homicide rate. Similarly, what has happened to the percentage of cases being solved and successfully prosecuted? > 'community policing' [...] turns out to be more effective at stopping crime It's known as "policing by consent" by the British, where officers are meant to follow the "Peelian Principles" from 1829 [1] Of particular relevance here: 2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions. 3. Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public. 4. The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force. 9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it. [1] http://independentpolicecommission.org.uk/peelian-principles http://independentpolicecommission.org.uk/peelian-principles

drpgq 13y ago

"Police officials also credited their efforts at identifying and monitoring abusive husbands whose behavior seemed poised to turn lethal." I found that interesting. I always felt that for domestics there wasn't a lot you could do, but I guess that's not the case.

specialist 13y ago

Apparently at least some of the crime statistics have been fudged. The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation http://www.amazon.com/The-Crime-Numbers-Game-Manipulation/dp/1439810311 http://www.amazon.com/The-Crime-Numbers-Game-Manipulation/dp... So now I don't know what to believe. My guess is that violent crime has gone down, but not as fast as the police depts have reported.

chaz 13y ago
This American Life did a story about this [1] not too long ago, and featured an officer who recorded conversations from NYPD supervisors instructing officers to downgrade or not report crimes so the precinct looked better. There's also another story about the use of CompStat in the NYT. [2] For the context of this post, however, I think it's fair to assume that murders are getting pretty accurately reported, since it's hard to downgrade or not report a murder. [1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/right-to-remain-silent http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/r... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/29/nyregion/new-york-police-department-manipulates-crime-reports-study-finds.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/29/nyregion/new-york-police-d...
GabrielF00 13y ago
David Simon of The Wire has talked about this. You can fudge statistics for things like robbery, burglary, rape, etc. by reporting them as lesser crimes or otherwise making them go away, but it's much more difficult to fudge the stats when it comes to murder, because murders are so visible.
- specialist 13y ago
  I don't remember where I heard this, but one journalist/investigator compared crime reports with hospital admissions and bodies in the morgue. They didn't match, eg underreporting. The most extreme example I've heard is Disney World in Florida, where the body is removed from the premises (jurisdiction) before a report is filed, so they can keep the fatality counts down.
rwhitman 13y ago

zeroexzeroone 13y ago

Runs faster in memory, allegedly.

bluedino 13y ago

What's the drug scene like in New York these days? First you had heroin, then the rise of crack cocaine, but since then the murder rate has gone lower and lower (early 90's) There's a very close link between the drug trade and inner-city murders.

wavefunction 13y ago
This is an insightful post. The numbers posted above start at 1990 which was the tail-end of the decades of heroin, cocaine and crack epidemics in NYC. It looks like crime is back down towards a rate similar to 1965: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm Not sure about the exactness of these statistics, just a quick google result that seems legit.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  What the hell was this zeroed for? There is absolutely nothing in this post that is factually incorrect or presented in an offensive manner. HN really should show who's voting on posts.
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    I'm with you on that. Or it should force someone to comment if your down voting, but that has notable drawbacks when a comment is just plain inflammatory.

yoster 13y ago

1993 was pretty gangster all over the country...

zaroth 13y ago

Buried in the 2nd to last paragraph: "The program relies heavily on tracking the online activities of neighborhood gangs, in effect, trying to prevent shootings before they happen."