This is from an op-ed piece at Fox News a couple of weeks ago:
Recent crime numbers support the notion that the city is becoming less hospitable. New York crime, at this writing, is up 33% overall. But significantly, there’s been a 36% jump in robberies and a 16% jump in felony assaults.
These are the kinds of numbers I've been hearing, and I finally got curious enough to go take a look for myself. Unfortunately, all this did was confuse me some more. Here's a CompStat chart that compares 2022 to 2021. Each dot represents the number of incidents during the month ending on each date. For example, the last pair of dots represents the month of October in 2022 and 2021:
So the numbers in the op-ed are approximately right, though they've dropped a bit since the day it was written. But the weird thing is that crime hasn't really gone up in 2022. From October of 2021 to October of 2022, crime is up only 6%.
Then why the big numbers? Answer: the NYC crime rate dipped peculiarly from November of 2020 through February of 2021 before returning to its usual rate in September. During that time the number of major crime incidents was much higher in 2022 than 2021.
But if you look at the first date on the chart (October 2021 compared to October 2020), crime starts out 14% higher. On the last date, it's up only 6%. Basically, everything has caught up, and the big yearly increase is solely because of the big dip in the middle of 2021.
This doesn't mean New York has solved its crime problem. Major crimes are up 21% from October of 2020 to October of 2022. On the other hand, crime has been dropping since August and is slowly getting back to its old level.
Do you see why I'm confused? There are a whole lot of numbers you can make a case for, and I'm not really sure which one best describes facts on the ground in New York.
Things are simpler in Los Angeles. CompStat reports that violent crime is up only 3.6% from 2021 to 2022, so there's no big problem to begin with.
Needless to say, it would be better if crime were down instead of up. Still, it doesn't really look to me like there's a huge crime wave in New York right now, and there's certainly no big crime wave in Los Angeles. But the numbers are confusing. I might change my mind if I figure out an even different way of looking at them.
Add a temperature line to the graph.
Faux is so full shit. I don’t see them leaving their comfy homes in NYC. Subways were getting bad when no one was on them particularly in the outer Boro’s. Gotta figure as the masses come back it will ease. Homelessness and drug addicts are a big problem as well. I have no answers for that.
Odd that six percent is considered not all that much. Grading on a curve perhaps?
There was a drop in crime during Covid lock downs. It will bounce back to some degree once things open up. The question is...are we back on the trend line, or is the trend really moving in a different direction? We'd really need to go back to pre-covid times to follow.
Ah... Another Fox News chart that fails to adjust for inflation. 😉
Crime numbers are so dependent on what the police decide to pay attention to. Locally I see periodic hand wringing about how bad a particular bar district is, then a crackdown follows and crime plummets, then the police start to ignore the problem and the crime comes back. All focus is on short-term problems and results, with zero effort made to solve the systemic reasons for the crime.
Kevin: "Still, it doesn't really look to me like there's a huge crime wave in New York right now, and there's certainly no big crime wave in Los Angeles."
LA's homicide rate is about twice that of NYC, and has been for a number of years. NYC is doing fine. Homicides below national average, other crime also fairly low. There was an increase, but even with the increase numbers are pretty good. So the whole focus on NYC is weird, though not surprising given it is Fox News.
Now, there is some amount of concern about crime among New Yorkers at the moment. I think it is basically a combination of (1) fairly few but high profile and random attacks (attacks in subways, hate crimes against Asians) -- each such attack has a huge impact, (2) a general sense of rules unraveling over the last two years with little enforcement (e.g., speeding in neighborhoods, fake paper license plates, etc), and last but not least (3) some amount of political agitation via online communities such as nextdoor, but maybe most importantly (4) the immediate dissemination of attacks via email and messaging.
On (4), a personal perspective: I work in downtown Brooklyn, in an area that had a lot of violent crime 30 years ago but is now quite safe. My younger daughter also goes to school in the neighborhood. If there is a gunshot fired anywhere in the neighborhood, I will get an email from my employer with an update. I will also get immediate messages from my daughter's school about them going into lockdown.
20-30 years, crime was much higher, but I would not have known about the gunshot. Certainly not in real time. Even if there was a murder, I would have never known unless I encounter an article about it later. Whenever one of these messages is sent out, there is a flurry of responses from worried parents. These notifications are great, but we need to learn how to deal with them.
In LA weren't there big increases prior to 2021? if violent crime climbed 15% in 2020 and 2% in 2021 that's still crime being really high.