Crime in New York City Plunges to a Level Not Seen Since the 1950s
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I know the parent comment only said this in passing, but let's be careful about assuming poor communities are gang-infested or dangerous. AFAIK, gangs are not a problem in most American cities.
In Manhattan, I think the last pockets of seediness were in Alphabet City but that has quickly gentrified as well. As far as I know gang-related activity near NYC is now concentrated in parts of Brooklyn and Long Island (I.e MS-13)
Broadly, I agree. To refine my point: Most street gangs are in poor areas but most poor areas don't have street gangs.
> gang-related activity near NYC is now concentrated in parts of Brooklyn and Long Island (I.e MS-13)
Does anyone know any hard data on MS-13 activity? Government has made it a talking point recently but I haven't seen data on how common it really is.
> I’m also not necessarily suggesting gentrification is a net positive, just a big factor in declining crime rates in NYC.
That seems true to me and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise.
I guess my general point, which was not a criticism of yours (yours just made me think about it), was: Let's be careful about broad stereotypes which can and do result in criminalizing poor people. I will add an observation by the esteemed Woodrow Wilson Guthrie: "Some will rob you with a six-gun, / And some with a fountain pen." I would guess that the latter cause far more harm each year than the former, and in NYC especially.
> MS-13 is in every major city in the US, the scale obviously varies.
Is that also from the data?
> They get so much attention due to the extreme violence they tend to utilize, rather than the sheer number of members.
This is the kind of thing I try to avoid: Do we know that the violence is more extreme than other gangs? And I suspect they get attention because it fits the White House's / GOP's immigration narrative. But who can say why something gets attention?
https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/ms-13-long-island-k...
I walk around all parts of the city considered “dangerous” (Bayview, Mission, Ocean View/Ingleside) and nothing has happened to me. Really the only “bad” area SF has is the Tenderloin and it’s common sense not to be out there wandering around even during the day.
By and large NYC and San Francisco are both very safe cites in the grand scheme of things. (Unless you are a car window in San Francisco. Then you are screwed).
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/11/25/group-of-teens-strik...
[1] http://www.newsweek.com/new-yorkers-are-getting-sucker-punch...
In 2014 (NYC has only gotten better), SF is substantially worse by virtually every measure - some metrics over 3x worse per capita.
Trying to equate them - or even consider them similar - is generally dishonest.
You can't use a personal anecdote to suggest SF is at least as safe as NYC or other major urban centers. "Anecdotally" I saw way more broken glass on sidewalks from car break-ins, saw several phone jackings in broad daylight, and, at the same day, remember wondering to myself on many days why I hadn't seen a single police officer/car on my regular commute...
Though I may have a different perspective on “crime” since I’m not as easily scared and use my senses to keep me out of trouble. It’s a city, shit happens just make sure it doesn’t happen to you.
I just moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn - it's not the same as Manhattan, but I still feel safer in Brooklyn than in SF.
And you say "avoiding the tenderloin even during the day is common sense" - it's not the Bronx, it's in the middle of town. Make a left from a $400/night hotel room and you're standing next to human feces and needles.
That would be like if I told NYC visitors to "avoid midtown west in Manhattan, it's just common sense."
But you know what is interesting - you would've gotten that advice in NYC in 1985. Times Square wasn't safe. Now it's a shithole of a different variety - but a safe one.
SF doesn't need to be the way it is.
To be fair, there are human feces all over downtown.
What are broke people supposed to do, hold it until they get a job?
That said, I certainly don’t blame them for being transgressive.
I don't go to SF unless I have to now. I have no idea why rich people are still flocking to SF. It is only a matter of time before the homeless set up at Broadway and Broderick.
Last time I was there I saw a nice woman driving in a top-line Range Rover with her cute blonde kids in the back. They stopped at an intersection near the Bay Bridge. The underpass was jammed with tents and all manner of desperate people. Some young guy from the camp made eye contact with them and stared them down from a distance...they were oblivious. These people think the invisible wall will hold. I don't want to be in SF the day it breaks down, and I am convinced it will.
The city government isn't liberal enough to raise a local tax to build a solution, but also not conservative enough to take a hard line. They're just letting it fester and it will become worse and worse until someone decides to break through the invisible line separating the tent cities from the Pac Heights mansions.
I find it extremely difficult to have meaningful conversations when we obscure our values and are not transparent about our ethical reasoning. The commenter said the driver was nice but clearly didn't interact with her. "Nice" is a signifier of value and I was hoping to tease out a conversation about that.
It seems pretty bad that a major western city has a completely no-go area right in the middle. Dismissing it as not a problem because it’s common sense to avoid a large area of the centre of the city doesn’t help the argument!
Are you joking? Or just insane?
I'm a 160 lbs male and would not walk through the tenderloin at night. It's really fucking scary. Almost everyone there is homeless and on drugs. The bad kind of drugs.
I would go so far as to say that someone carrying an infant through that area might be endangering the child.
There are lots of people with kids who live in the Tenderloin and presumably pass through their own neighborhood at all hours.
Walking around near poor homeless people now counts as 'child endangerment' I guess...
The fact that SF tolerates shit like this under the banner of "acceptance", "it is mental health" or whatever the hell it may be is mind blowing.
This is nonsense. You must be extremely easily scared. For normal people, it's perfectly fine.
I mean I've lived in Bolivia and never seen _anything_ as bad as this at it's worst, in Bolivia's worst areas.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down...
The Tenderloin is a shithole. Don't go there. And don't park your car on the street down there unless you like replacing window glass. Loads of shady looking people standing around, selling and buying crack, screaming at the top of their lungs at ghosts as they zigzag down the street dodging cars, and homeless people shitting and pissing on the sidewalks. Also lots of petty theft and assault, and the SFPD doesn't do much about it.
I've never witnessed a single act of crime like that in any other city I've been to on earth (I lived in Europe, now in Asia), so it was quite shocking.
Dnainfo had a map of nyc gangs and it was funny because they all looked like xbox live usernames, and then the awkward reality set in that the gangs are all 14* year olds
*hyperbole
Sites that pride themselves on accurate information should consider a different model
It's interesting to me how so many people confuse the absence of poverty/crime/homelessness with a system that has solved it. NYC has less of these things because it has undergone extreme gentrification and has politics and police which treat the homeless much worse. This is the opposite of what most people consider to be a real solution, yet NYC is praised for it. It is praised for the ends, not the means.
SF actually employs more of the policies people claim that they want to see, and as a result, it welcomes more homeless, and as a result, has more homeless, and as a result, it is demonized.
It's so backwards.
San Francisco can't manage to handle 3,000 to 4,000 people without permanent shelter (~6,600 total homeless), despite its immense affluence as a city. It's a failure of priorities.
I'd argue that it's easier for a smaller affluent city of 860k to solve a problem of roughly 3,000 +/- homeless people (their problem isn't the 6k overall figure, it's a smaller subset of that), than it is to deal with 10x that homeless figure at 10x the city size. Human problems like that get more difficult with scale rather than easier.
I'm not sure how SF weather plays in to providing shelter space for the homeless as a problem. It should be easier and cheaper for SF to do it, as SF requires both less air conditioning in the warm months and less heating in the cold months. Of course, this is also where SF's terrible zoning laws show up as usual.
Homelessness exists in a complex relationship with many other personal and social problems. The provision of shelters is only one element of the solution. If you aim for a complete and rapid elimination of visible rough sleeping, you'll inevitably end up persecuting rough sleepers or bussing them off to somewhere else. There is a great deal that can be done to reduce rough sleeping and much of it isn't being done, but there's no magic wand.
When you make housing for the homeless dependent on being sober and clean, just what, exactly, do you expect as an outcome if not that?
THIS moralizing "Oh, but you've got to DESERVE the help!" is partly why homelessness (and poverty) are still major problems in the US.
(Oh, and the truly pathetic NIMBYism in San Fran doesn't help anything... It makes solving the housing problem in general intractible. Seriously, shut up about the "character of the city" when you're really just using that as an excuse to increase your home value and when that "character" leads to a whole bunch of homelessness and rent that is impossible for people seeking jobs to afford.)
Note my use of the word "unmanaged". It's possible to house people with active substance abuse problems, but it's considerably more challenging, particularly heavy drinkers and crack users. There is a significant impact in terms of care because you're dealing with people who have a limited capacity to look after themselves, but the primary impediment is aggression and violence. It only takes one difficult resident to turn the whole facility into bedlam, at which point you're faced with few options other than evicting them for the sake of the other residents.
Wet houses do exist, but they're a lot more expensive to run and they face far more local opposition. They're a fundamentally good idea, but housing alcoholics and other difficult-to-house groups is a lot more complex than just "open more shelters". You need a highly skilled multidisciplinary team to make it work, and you're still going to have some amount of unavoidable rough sleeping.
If you still don't see where I'm coming from, imagine a crack addict with diagnosed antisocial personality disorder. Imagine someone who has been arrested multiple times for assaulting medical staff and police officers. Imagine someone whose life revolves around multi-day crack binges, which usually end in an episode of drug-induced psychosis and either an ER visit or an arrest. These people are not exceptional in the population of chronic rough sleepers, but they're exceptionally difficult to house.
Good luck.
Sometimes the best answer is to just give them their own space instead of a shared facility.
I've had plenty of contact with the homeless, have housed them in my own home for a night or three. They all have at least some kind of substance abuse problem (every one smoked, for instance). But if you push them out on the street, they'll end up eventually in the ER or in contact with police. This is way more expensive.
Housing is a crucial part of the response to homelessness, but it's only a part. Some people can walk straight into a home and get back on their feet, but some people will need intensive support and others just aren't ready to be housed.
Compassion is reducing the friction to life, somehow creating $500/month apartments with no credit checks and month to month.
Compassion isn't letting the homeless do anything, camp and violate other's rights, disrupt and distress the working lower to middle class, and reducing the penalties for petty crime while increasing the fines for minor infractions by taxpayers.
If you don't have good shelter for these conditions death is pretty much a guarantee. I sure as hell would never want to be homeless in NYC during a winter like this one. You cannot discount the effect of weather on homeless populations, and even the homeless can typically scrounge together enough money for a one-way bus ticket to somewhere warmer, once.
>NYC has less of these things because it has undergone extreme gentrification and has politics and police which treat the homeless much worse.
This is part of the puzzle. However, I think there are other contributing factors too, like the weather. If I was homeless I sure wouldn't want to be in NY in winter.
Now I'm in a city with a lot of visible homeless and the government tolerating it is the real problem. They allow homeless to build massive camps filled with drugs, garbage, and human waste.
And they don't hang out in these gross camps for company. It's mostly for easy access to drugs. The city should tear these camps down the day they form.
Homeless population is one of the toughest issues a city can have. Homeless people aren't stupid, and the more welcoming you make your city the more homeless you will end up with. Considering the size of the US, there's a practically unlimited number of homeless that can come to your city if it's welcoming enough, and that's exactly what has happened to SF. There's plenty of other places with decent weather, but the homeless problem in CA is mostly a product of the politics there.
We pour endless billions toward 'solving' homelessness when it's been a problem since ancient times. Some people are just too crazy or addicted to live a normal life. The answer is to bring back asylums to hold these people against their will, but that's too politically radioactive to do.
I have a family member of the crazy variety and I would love if they were in an asylum. I wouldn't have to worry about them dying on the streets. This family member is so crazy that if you gave them a house they would likely burn it down or otherwise ruin it anyways. Far too crazy to live with the family, basically a danger to themselves and society. I would guess the majority of homeless are the same.
All these initiatives to provide housing and training are misguided, a normal person will rarely be homeless for more than a few months. The majority of the homeless population is chronic, and these people would already have shelter if they were sane or sober enough to maintain one.
(Yes, recently the population of Manhattan has gone up, although it hasn't fully recovered from the downs of 1980's and is still much lower than 100 years ago).
That in turn has a demand side cause -- the continued influx of highly paid tech workers -- and a supply side cause -- the economically illiterate politics which paints housing development as some sort of handout to developers. The supply side of this problem could be fixed through political means, at no real cost to anyone. New York has 6x the population density of San Francisco yet lower housing prices, because it has the capacity to meet the demand.
This is basically slowly happening in SF as well. As much as SF-natives didn't want the "Manhattanization" of SF, it is happening just with a lot fewer people able to afford it.
> But criminologists differ about the cause of the continued declines. Mr. Zimring said that while better policing accounted for much of the decline in crime since 1990, it was no longer a primary driver. New York is “tiptoeing” toward a 90 percent crime decline for reasons that remain “utterly mysterious,” he said.
The "27 straight years" caught my eye, and reminded me of something I saw a good decade ago, so may I suggest something controversial?
It doesn't perfectly match 27 years ago, but this is across the whole US, not just NYC - (popular) violent video games are highly correlated with the drop in crime: http://oi25.tinypic.com/2r6ns4y.jpg
(Correlation <> causation, but I _definitely_ think it merits more investigation... does anyone else happen to know more?)
It's also known that male participation has dropped in the labour force and in particular young males without many skills who also tend to commit crime:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/7/15933674/vi...
Personally I think there is something in this. A big, time consuming engaging hobby appearing that young males take to with great enthusiasm appearing as games got cheaper and better.
Here is something on it:
https://www.polygon.com/2014/9/12/6141515/do-violent-video-g...
It's a really hard thing to study though.
> A big, time consuming engaging hobby appearing that young males take to with great enthusiasm appearing as games got cheaper and better.
I wasn't even thinking along those lines, my thought was more about the "violent" part of "violent video games" - that the games acted as a sort of stress release valve, helping people with their self-control when it matters.
It's also worth noting that the drop in crime has also happened in a bunch of countries around the same time.
Another thing that has happened at the same time is the rise of Hikikomori and others who stay at home with their parents and don't do a lot.
Now of course, there are phones in the hand of so many young people giving them a constant feed of engaging content. This no doubt hinders people's concentration but it also might, again, stop people comitting crimes.
* First instinct is that the fall-off should be more gradual if it's based on people's ages, not have that sudden sharp descent. I don't put a lot of weight to this though since the 20-year gap makes it sound like the exposure has to be under a certain age (and so within a relatively small range), which would appear as a relatively sharp drop.
* Second, after noticing the graph doesn't actually look like the one I posted (which jtmarmon posted confirmation to in a google doc), I took a closer look: It claims to be using "violent crimes per 100,000 population", but instead matches this chart from wikipedia [0], which isn't scaled by population - it's using raw numbers from the UCR data tool [1]. If the gasoline line is labeled wrong as well, then there's probably no issue, but if it's labeled correctly then half the correlation for this story isn't actually a correlation. Not sure where to look for that one, though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Violent_Crime_in_the_Unit...
[1] https://www.ucrdatatool.gov/Search/Crime/State/StatebyState....
What happened to poor, mostly black youth in cities was akin to a war — a generation or more lost.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fWUKgbmXNe1js778gaJn...
(see source in data sheet)
The NYCHA, on the other hand, appears to be functional and provides relative security and stability for its residents, while the city provides enough work opportunity for those who can and want to work. You couldn’t write an article like this about Chicago: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448741/new-york-city-m...
The rust belt has no effective welfare system akin to http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448741/new-york-city-m.... To my knowledge the rust belt only offers disability.
"It’s working, for now, in New York. Detroit had a little less luck with it, because there are not very many 26-year-olds earning $600,000 a year who want to live in Detroit."
It's hard to create a welfare system akin to NYC when young professionals do not want to move there.
While listening to the great podcast "Mogul", it struck me how many people were pushed away from gangs due to the success of friends/family in the hip-hop industry.
Aristoteles used it to explain why theater was a good thing, when people were complaining that violence in dramas may cause violence in society. The global idea is that it purges it instead (people experience violence during a play, so they are less inclined to want to experience it in reality).
They also reclassified many crimes. Also, cops aren't always eager to take reports (I speak from experience).
Yes, there are less homicides than ever, but it's still painful to watch manipulation of statistics in slow motion.
On the flip side sex crimes are quite up (again, reported).
Well, that’s not new, so it’s not like cops suddenly stopped reporting even more crime
Perhaps for something like an iphone being stolen, but I doubt that applies to homicides.
Downplaying crimes means less serious crimes on the books, which makes the department commander look better, and improves re-election chances for mayors.
In NYC, due to the 1990's and the vivid memories some of us have of what safety was like then, crime is an extremely make-or-break factor in electoral races.
Unfortunately, these memories are fading and people's understanding of crime reporting statistics aren't improving, either.
Yes, it's official that NYC reclassified many crimes in the last 24 months. Whether or not this was good is subject to debate; but undoubtedly it leads to a 'lower crime rate.'
That's the legal, official piece of the puzzle. The unoffocial one comes to play when you try to convince the cops not to downplay a crime you report. No one carries statistics on officers downgrading crimes when they file reports.
This became really obvious when sex crime victims started getting press attention and reporting anecdote after anecdote of victim-blaming, indifference and worse.
An increase in reported sexual assaults isn't necessarily a signal of crime trends as it may reflect an increase in willingness of victims to report versus past years.
Speaking of Baltimore and its homicide rate, the Sun had a great investigation in 2010 that busted the department for having a sharp drop in reported rapes while having a steady/increasing homicide rate -- a great example of the use of (relatively simple) statistics -- such as how Baltimore was one of the few major cities to have more homicides than rapes -- that effected change:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-city-rapes-gal...
A followup story reported the "good" news:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-md-ci-sex-offense-change...
> A major category of crime is up substantially in Baltimore, and police and city officials are pleased.
> A year after The Baltimore Sun revealed that the city led the country in the number of rape reports discarded by detectives — part of what women's advocates and victims said was a broader pattern of ignoring sexual assaults — the number of rapes being reported is up more than 50 percent.
Yes, but you also need to take into account that emergency rooms have gotten much better at treating gunshot wounds and other serious crime-related traumas. I.e. even with the same exact level of crime, the homicide rate would still have gone down significantly over the last few decades.
But New York's low crime rate is remarkable not only when compared across decades. The 2017 reported numbers are notable because it's yet another year of improvement in the post-Bloomberg-tough-policing era. At its peak, Bloomberg's policies resulted in 685,724 stop-and-frisk reports in 2011. After a lawsuit in 2012 -- stop-and-frisks declined to 45,787 by 2014, Bill de Blasio's first year. In 2016, the number was 12,404:
https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data
This radical departure in policy was blamed for a jump in homicides and shootings in 2015 [0], even as the NYPD reported a massive drop in complaints [1]. In 2017, both complaints and violent crime are at lows. If only felonies and violent non-homicides had decreased, you could make an argument that the dropped rates are from police cooking the stats. But healthcare tech hasn't improved that much from 2014 to make a huge dent in killed persons.
[0] http://abc7ny.com/news/mayor-de-blasio-calls-on-nypd-to-lowe...
[1] http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/544-14/de-blasi...
Cops have no say in whether to take or not take a report. Call 311, make a police report, meet the officer dispatched to you and sign. I agree that getting the NYPD to actually act on a police report is puzzlingly difficult.
There was also an infamous case where a pattern of attempted rapes got reported as lesser crimes like trespassing, so a serial offend who should have gotten a serious investigation never got one, and went uncaught for a long time.
One time I tried to report a theft. I gave up after the third time the cop who was answering the phones at the local police station hung up on me.
The implication is that, if you do lose something or have it stolen, there is no way for the police to help you get it back.
NYC actually does, but you have to register your number before it gets stolen.
Usually this is fine, because most people don't know their serial number after the device is stolen, unless they've thought to register it beforehand anyway.
From the article:
rapes were down from last year by one, to 1,417, misdemeanor sex crimes — a catchall for various types of misconduct that includes groping — ticked up 9.3 percent to 3,585 so far
In addition, note that this is the year of the #metoo movement
Or it might be that the subway underground isn't policed much?
Not sure.
I would complain that I don’t see enough cops on the street (live in Brooklyn, work in Manhattan)
As I stated that was my first time visiting, so I am not really sure how that covers NYC from a local perspective - I was certainly tired after 5 days. However, I did see police everywhere I went, except at 2am when I was walking from the subway back to the apartment.
Source: born in and lived in brooklyn for over 20 yrs.
By comparison, Arizona has a total of about 14,000 police - for the whole state. Colorodo has about 12,000. Most states are comparable to this. You are just far, far less likely to see police officers in most other places in the country. As a New Yorker, I'm always astonished by the lack of police presence in other states (let alone other countries) because policing is so ubiquitous here.
Sounds like a prison.
1. If there's an uptick in crime, police will put up a manned tower for a while.
2. If there's a murder, they will set up a mobile command center in the vicinity.
3. They regularly use helicopters to hunt down suspects. I hear them maybe once or twice a month flying in the area.
Population of St. Louis: 312,000
Population of NYC: 8,537,673
http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article191211704....
Super harsh sentences for serial small crimes, drug dealing, etc.
You remove any young male who has potential to become a criminal from the street and all you’re left with is white collar crime.
Unpopular facts.
i concede that the sea may change for guns sometime in the next century; they can make things very chaotic as population density increases. still, i maintain that freedom of speech is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for a stable and free society.
White collar crime is bigger than ever. Today's organized crime operators have better things to do than shake down shopkeepers for protection money, run a numbers racket, or try to resell stolen goods.
As of Dec. 20, police officers intentionally fired their service guns in 23 encounters, a record low, down from 37 in 2016. The Police Department said officers were relying more on stun guns, which were used 491 times through November, compared with 474 times during the same period in 2016.
For example, I fell asleep for the first time on a 2 train last month, and was robbed. It was one of those, "Ah, this is definitely on me," moments. Easily preventable; however, it's still crime, nonetheless. Most importantly, I didn't report this (as many others in similar situations will not), so the statistics are probably not as accurate as headlines would like you to think.
So I'm not surprised that crime has fallen, given the sheer number of police officers present.
My personal experience with the NYPD has been very good.
- As others have noted, heavy police presence in heavily frequented areas, particularly by tourists.
- During Sandy I was in the area without power. At night a police cruiser would go down my street every couple of hours (IIRC) with the lights on but no siren, I guess looking for looters.
- I had a car alarm go off at 1:30am early Sunday morning right outside my window. While I was figuring out what to do and calling 311, a police van turned up (around 1:50am) and broke into the car and disabled the alarm. I went out to speak to the officers and they said just call my local precinct and any unattended car alarm is cause for the police to come up (defined as >10 minutes).
That all being said, there's a pretty dark side to policing and the criminal justice system in NYC too, most notably in the treatment of minorities. Some examples:
- New York's ridiculous gravity knife law [1], which seems to be used by police selectively to target minorities. The New York legislature has now twice overwhelmingly passed reforms only to have this (now twice) vetoed by Governor Cuomo on thin justification [2]. One can only presume he's kowtowing to the law and order crowd.
- Alleged racial bias in pedestrian stops, seemingly often under the guise of seeking a mysterious African-American male suspect in his 20s who is 5' 10" (which can be pretty much anyone).
- The appalling case of Three Years in Riker's Island Without a Trial [3], as win-rate obsessed prosecutors use stalling tactics, the imbalance of power, the ignorance of suspects and plea deals to deny people due process.
- The arrest of James Blake [4].
- Chokehold death of Eric Garner [5] for a relatively minor offense.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/opinion/new-yorks-outdate...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/nyregion/gravity-knife-cu...
[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law
[4] https://www.boston.com/sports/tennis/2017/09/19/ex-tennis-st...
edit: forgot the URL for this story https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/why-is-new-york-so-much-safer...
> A 2015 study by Rutgers University public policy researcher Paul A. Jargowsky found that more than a third of all poor African-Americans in Chicago live in census tracts with poverty rates above 40 percent, compared with 26 percent of poor African-Americans in New York.
The headline news about Chicago homicides and shootigns (e.g. "WAR ZONE: 10 Killed, 28 WOunded in Chicago Over MLK Day Weekend [0]) don't convey how concentrated the violence is in specific areas of the city. I visit (middle-class) friends who live downtown and uptown (along the lake) and it feels as safe as any of the nice parts of Manhattan when I lived there.
Chicago Tribune does an excellent job tracking shootings [1]. You can easily see -- after zooming in a little -- on even their overplotted dot map that areas other than Chicago's west and south sides, shootings are virtually nonexistent:
[snapshot] https://imgur.com/gallery/uPfSG
FWIW, according to the Tribune's tracker: In Chicago, 3,543 people have been shot this year. That is 784 fewer than 2016.
[0] http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/dsp/search.htm?frompage=...
[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/data/ct-shooting-victims-...
Aren't there numbers to suggest that poverty itself is negatively correlated with both violent and property crime?
So how does that explain Detroit, which has more poverty than Chicago, but also has a NYC-like downswing in homicides?
In metro Detroit, 49% of African Americans who are poor are living in census tracts where at least 40% of the residents are poor, the highest rate among the Top 25 metro areas
"Detroit has the second highest murder rate in the United States"
violent crime is down everywhere in the US, so it is still useful to see the relative ranking to other cities
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
is the point.
Via the FBI's UCR tool which has data from 1985-2014: https://www.ucrdatatool.gov/Search/Crime/Local/RunCrimeJuris...
Unfortunately I can't deeplink to pages so here are screenshots:
- Detroit having ~300 homicides is very good compared to the ~400 homicides it had in 2000. However, that doesn't quite match up to its population decline. The homicide rate in 2000 was ~41.6 per 100K, compared to 43+ in 2014 (and 2015 and 2016 I think).
- Meanwhile, Chicago's 2014 homicide rate was 15.2. In 2015, it was 17.5. And in 2016, it jumped to 27.8 [0]
That jump is a huge jump compared to historic trends. But still a relative low for Chicago when considering 1990-forward. According to the Tribune's homicide tracker, the number of homicides in 2016 was 792 [1]. In 2017, it's tracking to be 664 homicides, which would be a rate of ~23/100K. Still not great but seems too early to say that Chicago is on an unchanging course of increasing crime. And it doesn't make much sense to argue but what about Detroit? when comparing Chicago to NYC.
[0] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/data/ct-homicide-spikes-c...
I really wish crime statistics would be broken down by apparent motive (if known). That might actually tell us something.
One of the reasons racial ghettos have such an effect on crime is that violence can be driven by young people who can see opportunity near them, and who believe they don’t have access to those opportunities.
Understandable don’t you think? And it doesn’t require a culture of criminality. Just visibility into a differential of access.
As a side note, I hear this “culture of criminality” idea a lot, but I haven’t seen any science around it. Can you point me in the right direction?
http://www.fox2detroit.com/news/local-news/fbi-detroit-has-n...
For comparison's sake, Chicago's homicide rate in 2016 is 27.8:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/data/ct-homicide-spikes-c...
It's true that Detroit's homicide/violent crime number is at historic lows, but that tracks with the rest of the country.
https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/explorer/agency/MI8...
While Chicago has notably huge upticks from 2014 through 2016, they're also still at relative historic lows compared to past decades. And even with the dramatic upticks in 2015 and 2016 (crime rates appear to drop in 2017), Chicago is still well below Detroit's rates:
https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/explorer/agency/ILC...
I'm sure poverty and demographics, nor the police force and policy, aren't the only factors when comparing NYC and Chicago, although they are easier to quantify.
Poverty is nevertheless a factor, but it is usually a result of segregation. When public funding such as education, infrastructure, healthcare, and police are take away from these segregated, poor, high-crime communities to "safer, richer" communities, then gangs rise.
Popular culture portrays most gang members are African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, and whites are generally bikers (and they usually live in south/mid-west). That kind of stereotype only makes crime situation worse.
In NYC, at least from my experience, a diverse neighborhoods - influx of different cultures and races, different earning incomes, and different religious can help smooth out the tension. Diversity is not a magic bullet, and in some neighborhoods we don't see a big drop. Yet, a diverse neighborhoods have better chance in demanding for better resource distribution, so in the long-term the neighborhood will drive the bad out as the bad has little to feed on.
So the key is to remove segregation, have more diverse voice, and encourage neighbors talk to one another other.
And growing.
Segregation has been a disaster for black neighborhoods. More than anything else, this change feels to me like a big one.
Housing in Queens and Brooklyn are becoming less affordable. Then business owners like Chinese resturants and retail franchises are moving in to snatch the new population. The 1,2,3 trains are convenient to travel from and to Manhattan, so ideal for university students and young singles.
On the flipside there's a backlash, in the form of a knee-jerk anti-gentrification sentiment that rapidly escalates on racial terms. Both politically (community board priorities and attitudes) and on the street - there's a lot of hostility towards newcomers.
That one's incredibly complex. What you laud as desegregation, many in Bed Stuy, etc. would call displacement.
I think what you see when you have new populations come in (be they foreign or domestic) is "gentrification". The newcomers can instigate redevelopment and reinvigorate a neighborhood. Sometimes this result is not well received by some locals, but usually other locals with some interest in the community welcome the newcomers.
Poverty is concentrated and guns are available from adjacent, easily-accessible red states.
"We don't need more law enforcement.
We don't need more police and demonising headlines
and pitiful donations
what we need are investments
we need resources
it is imperative that anyone with any privilege at all take the steps necessary to provide the resources they see a lack of
this is possible with perseverance and vigilance"
-Eva Maria Lewis
street thugs cant afford to live in new york hence lower crime. its not result of any policies.
[0] - http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure...
Btw, the 'mourning old New York' thing pisses me off as well, as things have moved on and it's a welcome change that crime is down in Manhattan. I'm observing, not judging, when I say that the the city is playground for the rich.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2017/12/newarks_crime_decli...
In fact, crime in the whole country is down dramatically from what it was in 1990. So unless the poor are being deported, something else must explain the drop in crime.
plus its a new generation of thugs out there that understand that killing people attracts unwanted attention. hence lower violence.