The road to a safer city: The truth about crime in NYC right now

Lee Zeldin, hoping to ride fears of crime and anger at wrongheaded bail reforms passed under Gov. Cuomo to New York’s governor’s mansion, campaigned Friday at the site of a horrific rape in the West Village. He’s right that the man accused of the attack is a serial offender with 25 prior arrests who was being sought by cops for stunningly similar sexual assaults earlier this year and late last year. Carl Phanor quite obviously shouldn’t have been on the street — but he wasn’t on the street because of bad bail laws.

Zeldin doesn’t care about that. His assertion is that New Yorkers should be afraid, very afraid, and he will protect them. He promises to declare a crime emergency and unilaterally suspend four laws, which he almost certainly can’t do. He wants to bigfoot Manhattan voters and yank DA Alvin Bragg, which he shouldn’t do. All across the state, DAs exercise discretion about who to prosecute and how.

While Zeldin is right that crime trends in New York City are not good, he ignores recent positive signs. The NYPD’s latest report, reflecting complaints through the end of October, shows crime in the seven major categories up 30% over last year, 32% over 2020 and 20% over 2010. Rapes, robberies and felony assaults this year are up 11%, 32% and 14% over 2021. Transit crime is up 41%. This is a problem.

But simultaneously and importantly, sharp increases in arrests and prosecutions for illegal gun crimes — including by Bragg himself (Manhattan gun possession convictions are triple their 2019 levels) — have helped drive shootings down 13% and murders down 14% year-over-year. Comparing October 2022 to October 2021 looks especially promising in important categories of crime: Murders were down 33% citywide. Shootings, down 34%. Felony assaults, down 6%. Good.

The larger trendlines are troubling and must not continue. Letting judges factor in a defendant’s dangerousness, as they can in 49 other states, would indeed help, though data is clear it’s not some silver bullet. Meanwhile, there’s been a noticeable increase in mentally unstable individuals in public spaces, some of whom present threats to their fellow New Yorkers. Most of them need help, not incarceration. Disorder, while surely less threatening than violence, contributes to the feel of a city out of control.

This election season, there’s been an unhelpful industry of gleefully overstating the danger in the city’s streets for political profit. While rising crime must be contained — we want a stable city or one growing safer — it is not rampant either on the streets or the subways, and ought not petrify New Yorkers or hinder our economic recovery. Roughly the same number of people were being victimized in Mike Bloomberg’s New York. This remains one of the safest big cities in the United States, one that’s safer than plenty of rural areas to boot. Many a city in states with better bail laws and tough-on-crime prosecutors face more serious challenges than New York does.

Moreover, there are signs of progress. Dogged determination, not political panic, is the answer.