New York's Crime Reduction Myth: The Police Have Been Massaging the Numbers

One of the most infuriating public policy myths is the putative success of the Manhattan Institute's zero tolerance broken windows theory of policing. "All hail Giuliani for drastically reducing crime in New York by getting rid of those squeejee men evildoers," goes the myth. Who cares if that entails turning New York into a racist police state. Who care if other big cities with more humane policing techniques saw similar crime drops during the 90s boom. At least Giuliani and Bloomberg got rid of crime.

Or not. It turns out they've been massaging the numbers.

This excellent Voice expose reveals that there is strong evidence that the police departments of Bloomberg (and likely Giuliani before him) have been underreporting thefts (which make up the vast majority of crimes in the city, thus lowering the overall numbers year after year). Cooking the books on thefts (classifying them as "lost property") suggests that those same police are not to be trusted when it comes to their reporting of violent crimes.

In other words, the steadily declining crime statistics are total bullshit.

As Stephen Mastrofski, director of the Administration of Justice Program at George Mason University, said to the Voice, "The problem is that when you develop a system (like CompStat) that applies a lot of pressure on people to accomplish something that is difficult, some people (and sometimes quite a few) will take the easy route to show that they are meeting the new performance expectation. Same with body counts in the military in time of war. And cooking the books in the private sector."

NYPD Confidential reports that even aside from cooking the books, Bloomberg is using a crime index that the FBI itself has discredited, since "the old crime index gave equal weight to such non-violent crimes as burglary or larceny as to murder, assault, rape and robbery. The FBI report says that the non-violent category of larceny – theft – makes up 59.4% of all reported crime and 'the sheer volume of those offenses overshadows more serious but less frequently committed offenses' such as rape and murder."

The myth of New York being the country's safest large city is what makes New Yorkers swallow practices that would otherwise make them retch. Practices like infiltration of political groups, racial profiling, and omnipresent videotaping of every little step you take.

And now the evidence is clear: those crime reduction myths are nothing more than Giuliani/Bloomberg propaganda.


Tags: Bloomberg, broken windows, news and politics, New York, police surveillance, police state, , crime, , surveillance, , activists, , Village Voice