Posted on 01/28/2023 7:49:19 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Back in October, New York City Mayor Eric Adams made a joint announcement with Governor Kathy Hochul regarding a new public safety plan for the Big Apple. Dubbed the “Cops, Cameras and Care” program, they claimed that they would be adding more than one thousand additional police officers to the MTA force patrolling the subways. More surveillance cameras would be installed and they would begin moving most of the homeless out of the tunnels and into shelters. The state would provide a significant chunk of the money needed to make that happen. I’ll confess to having been a bit dubious when they made that announcement. We hear plenty of big talk from New York politicians, but it rarely translates into productive action. But perhaps they actually did something right this time. It was announced yesterday that a significant drop in subway crime rates has been observed over the past few months.
The rate of subway crime in the Big Apple has declined since the launch of a new safety plan in October, Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Friday.
During a joint appearance at the Fulton Transit Center in Lower Manhattan, officials unveiled NYPD figures that showed subway crimes were now occurring at a rate of 1.7 incidents per 1 million riders, down from 2.3 incidents in 2021 and 2022.
The rate is now nearly at the same level of 1.5 incidents per 1 million riders before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which ridership plunged and crime spiked to 2.8 per 1 million.
It’s not that often that we have the opportunity to celebrate any good news coming out of our larger cities, so I try to take that chance when the occasion arises. And if these numbers continue to remain down through the rest of the winter and the spring, we may be seeing a trend toward improvement. Crime rates in the subway system almost doubled over the course of the pandemic and through most of last year.
Another major improvement has been the significantly reduced number of homeless people in the tunnels, though that took many months to accomplish. The city has reportedly moved more than 3,000 homeless people into various shelters that have been established or expanded. Wherever you find large congregations of the homeless, you see increases in nearly all forms of crime. It’s just a fact of life.
The question now is whether or not these new policies can be sustained. The city has already burned through 62 million dollars in state funding to cover all of the costs associated with this expanded police presence. That money is going to be running out in the near future and New York’s City Council hasn’t even suggested they will be able to replace it with existing municipal funds without making major cuts elsewhere in the budget.
That fact should remind us of the underlying reality. Having the funding put in place for these programs was critical, but cash doesn’t make crime rates drop. These gains were achieved by the men and women of the NYPD who are out there every night putting their lives on the line. This should also be the final nail in the coffin of the entire “defund the police” movement. When New York’s police had their budget cut and their numbers dwindled, crime rates rose dramatically. When the funding was expanded and the force numbers increased, crime dropped in response. Is this really still a mystery to anyone? It shouldn’t be. It’s just a shame that we had to produce so many more victims of crime in New York City for more than two years to drive that lesson home. So let’s do away entirely with all of this “defund the police” nonsense once and for all, shall we?
Is it really down or have they just stopped prosecuting many crimes. I believe it’s the latter.
The public is so exasperated that they’re not even submitting police reports and therefore the crime is going down in the stats.
I ride the subways 4 days a week - main reason crime is down is that trains are more crowded and they started bouncing the homeless druggies more frequently than they have in the past few years. Not perfect but it’s a start.
“There are lies, damned lies and statistics.”
I don’t believe this convenient sudden trend is honestly happening.
There were statistics that talking or texting on phones in vehicles while driving was not as much a distraction as talking to a child in the rear car seat or listening to the radio or music system.
As a radio host said “There are many things in life we think are not right when we hear them and this is one we KNOW is not right.”
Well, it’s true.
Crime is down when the stations are underground, but, it’s elevated when the stations are aboveground.
(get it?)
I think the main reason for this "drop" is the numbers they are comparing them to are so inflated, there has to be a drop.
Agree.
Many crimes are unreported (example: majority of males raped by males) and the discouraged populace often say reporting it and the hassles from the system and threats from the perpetrators make it better to just forget about it. Long time Catholic Church sexual crimes went unreported for decades. Female date rapes with memory altering drugs are often reported.
A young woman student assistant was grabbed, fondled and partly undressed by a group of five “teens” who were preparing to gang rape her in the dark in a grassy area near the university library where I worked when a sound from someone approaching in the distance scared them and they ran away.
My point here is the mandatory university crime report summary for that night had no sexual assaults of any kind.
The police had thoroughly questioned her, she had to lie on a hospital device behind her neck painfully overnight (to make sure no bleeding in her brain was going on) and she was afraid to go out for a long time. We all knew about the incident but the statistics showed Zero. Woman at work said “I guess she doesn’t count.”
People have stopped taking the electric sewer. So crime should be down.
Subways are underground.
Crime is down in N.Y. city subways coz they ran out of victims.
Yeah, only the Crazy’s are riding and their afraid of each other!
If it is, it is a fluke. If it is not a fluke, then it is creative statistics. If it is not creative statistics, then it is simply not being policed in any way.
I suspect that in NYC when you try to report a relatively small crime (just a mugging without life-threatening injuries, for example), they tell you that you’re free to report the crime, but nothing will be done - so most people say ‘why bother?’.
Still, your chances of being a victim are 1 in a million.
Less serious == no ambulances necessary.
If you don’t report you don’t get bad results
Thank you both.
To get some straight dope from actual NYers rather than the prattle and ignorance of non-NYers is an unexpected gift.
I left Fun City 21 years ago and realize that I don’t know the city anymore. Born and raised, I spent my first 57 years there but it’s not the same place I left and there is no way I wou!d try to explain anything happening there today.
I find it disheartening and quite annoying to read all the pejorative posts about NYC from FReepers whose only “knowledge” of the city comes from TV shows.
I am a native New Yorker. Spent as much time in the city as you. My job had me all over the city. Survived the Dinkins years, the rebirth under Giuliani, 9-11, slow death under Bloomberg. I see New York city as a dying metropolis and don’t go down there often anymore.
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