Crime in New York City has hit new lows and Mayor Bill de Blasio is crowing.
The city saw declines in reports of both homicides and shootings in the first half of 2016, according to crime statistics released on Monday.
There were 161 homicides in the five boroughs through June — a 6.3 percent drop compared to the 172 reported over the same period last year.
Shootings were down about 20 percent in first six months of this year. There were 435, compared to 545 last year, according to the NYPD.
De Blasio said it’s the “fewest shootings in the first six months of any year in our history.”
Police officials say the declines were driven in part by a crackdown on violent street gangs.
Robberies, burglaries and auto theft are also down, and the mayor cheered one increase: gun confiscations went up 20 percent.
“The NYPD has found a way to get more and more illegal guns off our streets,” de Blasio said.
But despite 26 years of crime decline, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said people still tell him they don’t feel safe.
“I just don’t understand it when we’re reporting these type of numbers … You hear it all the time, and it frustrates us because those cops are out there working very, very hard,” Bratton said. “The numbers should speak for themselves.”
(AP)
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3 Responses
Homicide in New York City has dropped by 84%. The decline is so dramatic that it has even affected the homicide rate for the US as a whole. NYC is the safest large city in America except for those like San Diego that were permitted to annex huge areas of suburbs. Bratton deserves a lot of credit for that as he was Police Commissioner under both Giuliani and De Blasio.
But we still have a long way to go. Last year, NYC had 352 homicides. But London, UK, a city with about the same population, had 112. And it will take help from the rest of the country, specifically in making it harder for criminals to get weaponry.
I give a lot of credit to the drop in murders in NYC to the class of people who previously contributed most to the murder rate. I think there has been a real change in the outlook and sensibilities of the people who are poor and underpaid, the class of people who have historically contributed a disproportionate share of the murders in the City. I do not know why this happened, but maybe they just got tired of seeing so much misery among their neighbors and have struggled to make life better for themselves.
Oh, yes, one other thing: The drop in the murder rate continues in the absence of stop-and-frisk, and in the presence of a supposedly soft-on-crime mayor.