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Comment by tharne | Hacker News Reader

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The NYC police budget has increased every year since the "defund the police" movement. In fact, our cop mayor is slashing the budgets of almost every city office except the NYPD.

"Crime" is not at the core of this change. You'd know those things if you lived here, but you don't. You're just repeating what you read in the WSJ opinion section.

Crime (or lack of policing) is not one of the issues affecting NYC these days.

It's more like crazy high rent, bad transit, generational disillusion with traditional NY careers like finance and law, the advent of "feasible" remote work and, I wanna say, the effect of social media making it clear you could be somewhere where it's usually warmer, happier, healthier, and more human.

Speaking as a former Manhattan resident for 7 years who moved to Miami this Summer

which american city has better transit than new york?

Not every city needs transit the way NY does. Some are walkable, bikeable, or driveable. NY is walkable when the weather allows, but it's also suffocating in some ways

If you actually read the article you'll see it has nothing to do with crime. Crime remains at historically low levels: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statisti...

It has everything to do with expensive housing. NYC is becoming wealthier and whiter, with low income and minority residents forced to move out over housing costs.

New York has always had expensive housing. It's not as if that became a problem yesterday. On the other hand, crime varies considerably from decade to decade. I'm getting a good chuckle watching people bend over backwards to downplay the issue of crime in NYC. It often feels like crime is to liberals what climate change is to conservatives, a big problem made worse by their policies that's better off ignored.

No it has not always had expensive housing. How do you think artists used to live in Greenwich village?

The only people who live in fear of crime in cities are people who hear about it in headlines from afar. If you live there and don't have a reason to want to live in fear, you don't.

That's a bit circular isn't? Of course the people that still live somewhere don't worry about the crime as much, that's part of the reason that they're still there. The folks for whom it's a big deal, tend to leave.

Why do you think the decrease in population is attributed to crime/lack of safety?

I mean if you want police to get public support perhaps it would make sense to change the rules so that any racist highschool graduate with a superiority complex could not do 3 months of training and become a police officer. In Europe that would be unheard of. In Estonia you have to do 3 years in a university studying policing specialty, and then pass a psych evaluation.

You really think that the idea of defunding police is a bigger factor than a global pandemic that shut down the city and drove many small businesses out of the city? What an odd take.

> You really think that the idea of defunding police is a bigger factor than a global pandemic that shut down the city and drove many small businesses out of the city? What an odd take.

It's tough to say, but seems like the defund the police movement "locked in" a lot of the damage caused by COVID and continues to exacerbate it. Rule #1 of getting out of a bad situation is to stop making it worse.

My understanding is that generally NOBODY DEFUNDED THE POLICE ANYWAY. The mayor was a cop. I don't think he defunded anything. But it's still used as an excuse. "Someone had an idea of defunding the police, which is why people moved away..."

I think there's the same amount of explanatory power if you just point at economic conditions. When the economy is bad, there is more crime, which tends to centralize in cities because the increased density means more anonymity plus a greater target market for thieves.

Also, the 70s and 80s were peak times for young men who grew up with leaded gas poisoning. Previous generations did not have as much car pollution, car usage increased which led to those increases in crime.

Perhaps quality of life is part of the equation but your comment tells us more about your preconceptions than about the reality of the situation.

Public safety and looking for equity in policing has nothing to do with it. That's total nonsense.

Crime is down year on year.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00095/nypd-citywide-crim...

The article also lists the reason. The huge rise in cost of living and housing.

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