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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> Not to mention crime has been increasing...

Rikers was opened in 1932. It's seen far higher crime rates than this year's.

Murders, for example, are 1/4 what they were in the '90s: https://twitter.com/brianpmangan/status/1588275665350012928

Coverage of crime, though, disproportionately spiked, which is likely why folks think crime is high: https://twitter.com/brianpmangan/status/1588277958556274688

> It's hard to understand why you would want to close one jail and open 4 smaller jails further away.

Further away from what?

The intent (https://rikers.cityofnewyork.us/) is to bring prisoners into newer facilities closer to their families.

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It's not just media coverage, although that is a narrative being pushed. For instance, this Bloomberg article tries to paint that narrative: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-is-nyc-safe-crime-st...

However, if we look at the NYPD data [0], you can see that rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and car theft are all up by 14.4%, 34.4%, 25%, 2.2%, 45.3%, and 52.7% respectively over the last 2 years. Over the last 12 years, rape is up 22%, felony assault is over 50%, grand larceny up 37% and car theft up 30%.

How can you look at this data and say this is just a media narrative?

[0] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statisti...

I can be true that crime is WAY down form the ~1992 peak, and that it is way up relative to 2019. Crime can also be very localized, where a city wide increase in the rate of a particular crime might be 15% but for a few square blocks in Brooklyn it might be up 500%.

I'm a huge proponent of criminal justice reform. I hate cash bail, the drug war, over criminalization, and militarized policing. That said, NYPD needs to get off its collective ass on go solve murders, assaults, rapes, and grand larceny cases. The best deterrent for crime that we know of is the assurance that you will be caught.

There is simultaneously no reason that the NYPD should have a foreign intelligence unit and crime labs are underfunded.

> I can be true that crime is WAY down form the ~1992 peak, and that it is way up relative to 2019

Why are we talking about crime in the early 90s? The original discussion started with nonethewiser saying "Not to mention crime has been increasing..." This statement doesn't have anything to do with crime in the 90s. ceejayoz then replied that rising crime is a media narrative and brought up crime in the 90s. This is a total straw man argument. No one is asserting that crime is as bad as it was in the 90s.

You need a substantial period of time to prevent localized events from affecting the numbers. COVID measures started 2 years ago, which could be involved. The "defund the police" movement caught wind within that period, it could be that crimes are being over-reported.

Analyzing crime rates over a couple of years is fraught with sampling bias. E.g. there was an 83% decrease in mass shootings between 2018 and 2020, does that mean those aren't a problem anymore?

> Why are we talking about crime in the early 90s

Because that's when violent crime peaked, and there's ongoing discussion now about moving back to criminal justice policies from that era. It's useful to compare current data to that time period to the uptick of the last 3 years and ask ourselves if we really want or need the same response today.

My point of view is that there are lessons to be drawn from the past.

OP expressed a concern about prison capacity, and I think the intent in referencing the 90s crime rate was to point out that Rikers has seen much higher crime rates that what we're currently seeing.

Crime has spiked up quite a bit in the past few years in New York City and if you follow the narrative being pushed in the New York Post and other conservative organs, you'd think that crime level has nearly returned to the "bad old days" of the 90s. But your own stats show that even with the current boomlet, crime's still down 80% from the peak in 1990.

Of particular note, your data shows that all of the city's current crime numbers are still lower than 2001's, which was Giuliani's final and best year in office.

I agree that crime is lower than the worst time ever in NYC. But a lot of crime is still up 20, 30, 40% over the last 12 years. I'm sorry, but that's just really bad and calling it a media narrative because crime is still down from the all time highs is misleading in my opinion.

Like is your argument really "Well crime still isn't as bad as it was in the 90s so it's ok"?

> Rikers was opened in 1932. It's seen far higher crime rates than this year's.

This makes my point. Rykers has almost double the capacity of the 4 proposed jails combined.

> This makes my point. Rykers has almost double the capacity of the 4 proposed jails combined.

Rikers was sufficient when crime was 4x as high.

Some people (and I am not one of your "folks") actually observe and experience the decline. There's still a real world out there beyond the screen

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