Last week, the New York City Police Department released a press statement announcing a 0.4% decrease in “index” crimes for the year to date in 2023 compared to the same period in 2022. While this is good news, it is only satisfactory if one is satisfied with the 47.5% increase in these same index crimes since the same period in 2019, the last year before criminal-justice reform.
The Mayor realized he could show progress in the fight against crime by using the last year as a base figure.
From 1993 to 2019, overall crime in New York City declined, including from 2015 to 2019, while crime in other major American cities increased. In 2019, the New York State Legislature passed bail reform and other progressive criminal-justice reforms, and by Jan. 1, 2020, over 2000 career criminals were released from city jails.
By March 15, 2020, before any COVID restrictions, crime in the city had increased by 20% over the same period in 2019, reversing a period of 27 years of crime reductions.
Now the city wants to show “progress” in the fight against crime by using the elevated crime levels of 2022 as a baseline, rather than the much lower crime levels before the 2019 “reforms,” which is defining a new normal. The NYPD’s own statistics for the first six weeks of 2023, compared to the first six weeks in 2019, show that major crimes are up 47.5% since before the reforms.
While Jim Quinn, executive district attorney in the Queens DA office, respects NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell and believes that Mayor Adams is well-positioned to lead the fight to restore sanity to the criminal-justice system, a 0.4% reduction in crime for one month cannot be considered a success when a major crime is still up 47.5% over 2019.
Progressive “reform” advocates and legislators are using this 0.4% reduction statistic as another misleading talking point about how the fear of crime is irrational.
Progressive legislators have decided that the increased crime on the streets is an acceptable cost of their criminal-justice reforms. However, they cannot and will not admit that in public. They deny that the crime increases that coincided with reform are the result of reform, and they demand more data, denying that the tens of thousands of additional (mostly black and brown) victims every year since reform prove anything.
The Commissioner and the Mayor should compare today’s crime numbers with the pre-reform 2019 numbers rather than seeking quick and favourable, but misleading press headlines. Otherwise, they will lose not just the debate, but also any realistic chance of undoing the damage done by these reforms.
»NYPD releases press statement of 0.4% decrease in “index” crimes«
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