Desperate times...
Crime in New York isn’t like other cities — which is why it needs aggressive policing and gun control
- By FRANKLIN E. ZIMRING
- Last Updated: 1:26 PM, September 25, 2012
- Posted: 9:49 PM, September 22, 2012
After a long period of positive public relations, 2012 witnessed a summer of discontent in New York City about crime and policing. Three apparently quite different problems have generated public worry:
* In less than a month, three police shootings made headlines. A knife-brandishing lunatic was repeatedly shot by uninjured police in Midtown Manhattan. Nine bystanders were wounded by police bullets while the pursuing officers shot and killed an armed homicide suspect near the Empire State Building. Then a robbery victim was inadvertently shot and killed by police called to the scene.
Jeff Warzer
An NYPD officer learning how to stop and frisk.
* Frequent stop-and-frisk impositions by police, particularly if you’re young, male and are African-American or Hispanic.
* This has also been a summer with plenty of random violence. A recent college graduate was shot and killed in Harlem because he looked like somebody else. Two children were among the six persons in Brooklyn who survived drive-by shootings, but a 4-year-old in The Bronx died.
Whatever happened to the New York miracle?
If you look at the raw numbers, it’s still going strong. Rates of most major crimes are holding near their lowest levels of recent years, with homicides in the city actually down 16% from August 2011 through August 2012.
By the usual standards of the United States, the city of New York is a very low crime environment. But what makes New York exemplary by American standards also produces all three of the city’s current concerns.
The problem isn’t really crime in New York City — it’s life-threatening violence.
The accompanying chart contrasts two large North American cities that have recently experienced big declines in reported crime.
Each bar shows the New York crime rates in 2010 as a percentage of the rates in Toronto, Ontario. The reassuring news for New York is that its auto-theft and burglary rates are lower even than Toronto’s.
But robbery, the one often-violent property crime, is almost twice as high in New York and homicide rates in New York City are almost five times the rate per 100,000 as Toronto. Why this huge difference and how does it explain this summer’s discontents?
The major differences in robbery and killing are not because these crimes didn’t decline as rapidly as other transgressions in New York after 1990. Robbery rates, in fact, dropped 84% in the 19 years after 1990.
The problem was the starting points — which were so much higher than in other developed nations. Homicides, for instance, are down more than 80%, but the rate was so high 20 years ago that New York is still almost five times as dangerous as Toronto today.
It’s not the number of crimes; it’s the kinds of crimes. You’re less likely to have your car stolen than in Toronto, but you’re more likely to be shot here. And that explains the persisting problematics.
Why are the city’s police so quick to shoot and so hostile when confronting minority youth? In the decade beginning in 2002, a total of one Toronto police officer was killed in the line of duty, compared to 54 in New York City. Controlling for the different sizes of the police force, the average New York cop was nine times as likely to get killed as his uniformed northern neighbor.
One reason for fewer police deaths in Canada is fewer guns on city streets, despite the fact that both cities are governed by similar and strict handgun laws. The cause of death in Toronto’s only police killing in a decade was a snow plow.
What makes NYPD cops seem trigger-happy is the fear of guns in the hands of others, because firearms are the weapon used in 90% of killings of police in the United States. Fear of guns in the hands of others is also what motivates both stop-and-frisk and what often makes the officer hostile when conducting it.
And gunfire is also the major worry of citizens. For all the vast improvement in public safety in New York City, a homicide rate between five and six per 100,000 per year is still too high for public comfort.
Meanwhile, the city’s remaining killings are just as intensely concentrated, particularly among young African-American males. Homicide remains the leading cause of death for young men of color.
That doesn’t mean that restraint and good manners shouldn’t be higher priorities in the city’s Police Department. Indeed, the same problems that make police restraint more difficult in New York make it more essential.
Franklin E. Zimring is chair of the Criminal Justice Research Program at the University of California, Berkeley and author of “The City that Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control” (Oxford University Press), out now.