TIL: Crime Rates in NYC
I have been reading a lot of Fox News recently to get additional perspectives, different news coverage and came across this article talking about increased crime rates in NYC. The URL handle for the article reads “NYC-descends-into-anarchy.” I cringed at that; as a native New Yorker, I don’t happen to feel that way about the city but I have noticed Citizen Alerts popping up more and more in my immediate neighborhood. The video below is really hard to watch.
“The increase in violence has given rise to fears that the city could be returning to darker times, decades ago, when residents feared for their safety amid a crack epidemic. The new crime wave comes as the city also grapples with a faltering economy and pressure to enact police reforms championed by racial justice advocates.” Fox News
Anyway, this was pretty horrific so I decided to do my own research. Granted I’m an amateur, not a journalist so take my conclusions with a grain of salt but I hope you’ll find it as illuminating as I did. Other limitations: I’m using arrests, not incidents from NYC Open Data Portal which means, among other things, that I’m not including crime that is unreported and that this is subject to the bias of the arrest patterns for the NYPD.
Murder and Burglary rates are indeed on the rise in NYC but not other types of violent crime.
Murder is rising compared to historic benchmarks (12% YOY increase from 2019 and a 34% increase for the month of September from 2017–2019).
Burglary spiked earlier this year right after the George Floyd protests with a 136% increase for the month of June compared to June from 2017–2019.
Honestly, when I saw this I was plenty nervous but still suspicious. Burglary rose right around the George Floyd Protests but was it related to the protests or to people taking advantage of the protest?
At the same time, robbery, 3rd degree assault and felony assault are not out of line with benchmarks and actually looked like they were decreasing.
• Robbery experiencing a 14% drop since last year
• Assault in the 3rd Degree (aka Violent Assault)= 26% drop
• Felony assault = 12% drop
Ultimately, I found that murder on the whole has been rising since the beginning of the trump administration but is still much lower than other cities (like St. Louis) and much lower than the murder rate from the 90s. So murder and burglary drive the violent crime rates that Fox News is referring to but other measures of assault and mugging/robbery looks normal. Separately, I did check the NYPD data explorer and the month over month rates look similar to what I put together.
Still, potentially cause for alarm as a resident of NYC. So I tried to relate it back to the reasons that different news outlets say that there is a rise in violent crime.
Different news sources attribute this rise in murder and burglary to different reasons.
Fox News blames the passing of the anti-chokehold bill on June 8th, 2020 and the George Floyd Protests.
“The City Council pretty much took away the ability of the NYPD to make arrests,” SBA President Ed Mullins told Fox News.” citing the “ ‘diaphragm’ law, an anti-chokehold measure that prohibits officers from sitting or kneeling on a suspect’s back in a way that could constrict the diaphragm.” Fox News
Trump (who is not a news source but might as well be) blames Democratic governors and mayors across America for “anti-law and order” sentiment and chastising them for perceived weakness against “anarchists and agitators.”
The NYT doesn’t presume to know but does report on this and loosely attribute it to the fact that there has been rising unemployment and poverty rates in NYC due to the COVID pandemic which are in theory associated with increased crime rates.
What does the general public think of rising crime?
Pew Research did a particularly great analysis of the Gallup surveys on this subject. It suggests that Americans think crime is higher than it actually is and that there is a partisan divide on the importance of crime as a political issue (Republicans believe crime is more important of an issue than Democrats do). Does this have any correlation with economic inequality and race though? Not sure — wanted to investigate that further but didn’t have any data.
“While perceptions of rising crime at the national level are common, fewer Americans believe crime is up in their own communities. In all 23 Gallup surveys that have included the question since 1993, no more than about half of Americans have said crime is up in their area compared with the year before.”
Are chokehold bans associated with increased crime?
Overwhelmingly, the evidence suggests that this is not the case. Research from the useofforceproject.org investigated the use of chokehold bans and similar de-escalation measures comparing crime rates across police departments with lots of policies and very little.
“Moreover, our findings show police departments with more restrictive use of force policies have similar crime rates, including similar violent crime rates, as police departments with less restrictive use of force policies.” Use of Force
In fact, chokehold bans are not intended to handicap police officers. The ban is one of eight de-escalation policies that help keep violence between the police and the perpetrators of crime to a minimum. This research shows that implementing this policy will result in a 22% decrease in police killings.
It even reduces the rate at which police officers are killed or assaulted in the line of duty.
That being said, one limitation of this analysis is that it’s unclear if police departments that have low crime rates to begin with are more likely to enact these policies. would be nice to see a before/after analysis not just a peer comparison that accounted for income/race/number of arrests etc. There are other studies that do this though and do show a decline but not one I saw on that page.
Is it associated with Democratic or Republican leadership?
No, according to the NYT, which did a better analysis than I did because it compared NYC to similar cities over time, it doesn’t matter what type of leadership your town/city has — violent crime (which really means murder and burglary here) is increasing across the nation and is not related to leadership.
“Murder is up 29 percent in Democrat-led cities in the sample and up 26 percent in cities with a Republican mayor relative to the same time frame in 2019, and five of the 13 cities on pace for record-high murder counts have Republican mayors.” NYT
The actual “TODAY I LEARNED” component
- Murder and burglary are up in the last several months since pandemic. This is scary but it’s within reason with respect to benchmarks and a lot of it is driven by the pandemic itself.
- Anti-chokehold bans have nothing to do with increasing murder/burglary rates. I can’t see police officers responding to shooting incidents by trying to force the perp into a chokehold anyway. The most important thing is that these policies have been implemented in other cities with successful decrease in the collateral damage that happens during a police encounter. It is not a policy intended to handicap the police’s ability to make arrests.
- The disparity between how people perceive violent crime nationally versus locally (the fact that they believe crime is up nationally but not locally) is pretty interesting. Even though nationally crime rates have decreased tremendously since the early 90s (across the board for murder/robbery/assault etc), Americans will still believe that crime is up nationally and that is partisan. This is probably related to the fact that conservative news agencies equate a higher murder rate with “anarchy.”
- Fox News is reporting the truth (which is that murder rate is increasing) but falsely linking it to police de-escalation policies when it’s more likely that it’s related to the pandemic that Trump cannot contain. And Trump is just wrong.
Other Interesting Facts
According to Pew Research, most crimes are not reported or solved. Being a police officer is a hard job but should we be concerned about the ineffectiveness of the police at this point? What do I do with this information? It’s almost just as scary as the murder rate increasing. Don’t tell me that chokeholds increase the rate at which crimes are solved though.
