NYC is not a killing field

I have a weakness for the New York Post. Their politics are odious, but damn, they’re very skilled practitioners of the tabloid arts. Right now, though, they’re trying to convince New Yorkers—with some success, alas—that we’re in the midst of a horrid crime wave. Just as I was typing that, I got a notification from the Post on my phone reporting that four students were slashed in a fight inside a high school. The paper is tireless in its fearmongering.

In this campaign, they’re assisted by Donald Trump, who bellowed on his Truth Social platform a few months ago that “MURDERS & VIOLENT CRIME HIT UNIMAGINABLE RECORDS!” (caps in original, of course) in the city.

Fact-checking Trump and the Post are thankless tasks, but it seems worth setting the record straight. Crime is not at record levels—nowhere near it.

Let’s look at murders, the best measure to look at according to criminal justice connoisseurs for getting a sense of overall trends. Murder isn’t only the most serious crime around, the stats on homicide are also the most reliable of all, because few murders are missed and other types of crime are subject to reporting and classification errors. Here’s the history in a graph:

Last year, there were 391 murders in the city, down 11% from 2022, 20% from 2021, and 83% from the all-time peak in 1990. So far this year, murders are down 25% from the same period last year. If that rate is sustained through 2024, we’ll be back to the pre-covid lows. There is just no crime wave, but reactionaries like Trump and the Post want you to think so.

Since the city’s population has changed over the years (though not by as much as you might think), it’s worth looking at the murder rate, the number of homicides per 100,000 people. Here’s what that looks like. At just under 5 per 100,000, it’s down by 85% since the 1990 peak. It’s exceeded by cities that Trump and the Post editorialists no doubt imagine are safer, like Miami (11 per 100,000), Dallas (12), and Houston (also 12). Sad to say, NYC’s peak rate of 31 per 100,000.

Our terrible mayor, Eric Adams, could be making these points, but he doesn’t want to—he’d rather blame migrants for our problems. Besides, doing something about important things like the cost of housing or adapting to climate change might annoy the landlord class that runs the city. Better to stoke fears of our neighbors and of refugees.