A small but vocal contingent of the city’s political class characterizes those of us who are alarmed by increasing crime — and want more proactive policing, more effective prosecution and further refinement of state laws to ensure that lawbreakers face swift, sure consequences — as nothing but reactionaries. The city remains historically safe, they say, so the order of the day should be more criminal justice reform, not dialing back any recently notched progress.
While it’s true that every major category of crime was far higher back in 1993, the mantra that the city remains safe by almost any reasonable historical comparison is now tired and false.
See the latest weekly CompStat summary, which delivers the good news that murders are down 15% compared with 2021, while shootings have dropped by nearly 11%. It also shows large, sustained increases in 2022 compared with 2021 and 2020 in robbery, grand larceny, rape, felony assault, transit system offenses, misdemeanor assault and more.
More relevant to the self-styled historians, many of those crime categories are up substantially since 2010. Year-to-date in 2022 compared with 2010, there’ve been 25% more rapes, 51% more felony assaults and 38% more grand larcenies. While shootings were down 9% and murders down 21%, the total number of major crime complaints so far in 2022 is 21% higher than in 2010.
Yes, New York in 2022 is safer by every statistical measure than New York in 2001 or 1998 or 1990. But a dozen years of progress in crime is a lot to give back, and that’s saying nothing of the unnerving but harder-to-capture-in-statistics disorder that now proliferates on many streets.
Our current mayor, Eric Adams, won office last year in no small part on his promise to reverse what were already troubling crime trends. His and our continued pleas to Albany to change state laws have yielded minimal reform. The Legislature needs to awaken. But whether or not they fix a single statute, Adams — Mr. Pivot and Shift — may soon need a policing Plan B.
