
NYC Homicides Drop Sharply, Again - GabrielF00
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/nyregion/city-homicides-drop-sharply-again-police-cite-new-antigang-strategy.html?hp
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chaz
To provide a little bit of historical perspective on NYC's murders:

    
    
      1990: 2,262
      1993: 1,927
      1998:   629
      2001:   649
      2012:   417
      2013:   145 YTD
    

[http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/...](http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cscity.pdf)

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jacobr
You need to consider all improvements in trauma care since 1990. Some victims
that would have died in 1990 would make it today.

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bluedino
Does anyone have the #'s for say, shootings?

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epc
From the linked PDF:

Shooting Incidents YTD 2012: 581, 2013: 423

Shooting victims YTD 2012: 685, 2013: 486

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zzzz123
perhaps aiming abilities decreased? due to drugs?

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gnosis
There was a very interesting article[1] recently about the epidemiological
link between leaded gasoline and crime.

[1] - [http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-
li...](http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-
gasoline)

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w1ntermute
There's also the link between abortion legalization and the subsequent drop in
crime, mentioned in Freakonomics.

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specialist
The leaded gasoline theory better explains observations (gathered data). The
abortion rights theory is still _very interesting_ , and worth discussion, but
leaded gasoline is currently more right, to be amended and supplanted as we
learn more.

Science!

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thorum
Steven Pinker argues that since the separation between the cause (lead
exposure in childhood) and effect (criminal behavior in adulthood) is so wide,
there are almost certainly big confounding variables that we haven't
considered.

> There are reasons to be skeptical of any claim based on correlations between
> such widely separated variables as lead exposure (the cause) and crime (the
> effect). Consuming lead does not instantly turn someone i nto a criminal in
> the way that consuming vitamin C cures scurvy. It affects the child’s
> developing brain, which makes the child duller and more impulsive, which, in
> some children, and under the right circumstances, leads them to grow up to
> make short \- sight ed and risky choices, which, in some children and under
> the right circumstances, leads them to commit crimes, which, if enough young
> people act in the same way and at the same time, affects the crime rate. The
> lead hypothesis correlates the first and last link in this chain, but it
> would be more convincing if there were evidence about the intervening links.

source -
[http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_o...](http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_on_lead_removal_and_declining_crime.pdf)

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pdog
I wonder how much of the drop in crime rates can be attributed to Manhattan
and parts of Brooklyn increasingly becoming a haven for the superrich and
poorer people being priced out. An "outsize share" of the violence is in East
New York, Brooklyn, and South Jamaica, Queen.

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yummyfajitas
Probably some of it, but probably not a lot. The very poor are not actually
priced out of NYC. NYC heavily taxes the middle class and rich in order to pay
certain poor people to remain in the city (including very desirable areas).

The main people being priced out are the middle class, not the poor.

~~~
m0th87
To be fair, you don't just apply and you're in. You have to be in an industry
the city wants to grow, and even then it's a bit of a lottery, highly
dependent on how long you've lived in the City.

The absurdity of it though is that you can stay in the subsidized housing
program long after you switch industries and make bank.

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hollerith
>The absurdity of it though is that you can stay in the subsidized housing
program long after you switch industries and make bank.

My guess is that that is a side effect of the fact that you can stay _in your
subsidized apartment_ long after you switch industries and make bank. That
does not seem that absurd to me: in general, Americans are too rootless, so a
policy that incentivizes some people to continue to have the same neighbors
seems worth some amount of divergence from "perfect economic justice" or
whatever you want to call it.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Why is it beneficial to subsidize people having the same neighbors?

Roots cause unemployment, since they make people less likely to move to a new
job. If anything, we should be taxing the stationary rather than subsidizing
them.

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pessimizer
Roots also cause community, and make people more likely to organize to protect
and improve the conditions of the place where they live.

edit: As a simple illustration, I am a typical single, firmly middle class
professional who lives in a neighborhood that I have no connection to, is
nowhere near any of my family, and I know maybe one or two of my neighbors by
name. If the city decided that it wanted to dump all of its garbage in the
middle of my street, end rodent control, fire, and police protection in my
neighborhood, and add heavy metals to the water, I would just move to a place
where they weren't doing that, and leave the people who couldn't afford to to
rot.

As one of the members of the top 10% in household incomes, I could conceivably
keep doing that until 90% of the populace was mutating in a nuclear wasteland,
and I was reduced to a shitty studio apartment for $6000/mo in the outskirts
of a walled community guarded by our private paramilitary massacre-rape squad,
which periodically makes incursions into the wasteland to seize kitschy
furniture to sell to us on the inside.

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specialist
Apparently at least some of the crime statistics have been fudged.

The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation [http://www.amazon.com/The-
Crime-Numbers-Game-Manipulation/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Crime-
Numbers-Game-Manipulation/dp/1439810311)

So now I don't know what to believe. My guess is that violent crime has gone
down, but not as fast as the police depts have reported.

~~~
rwhitman
My friend was hit by a car the other night crossing the street in Brooklyn
(just bruised thankfully). It was a hit and run and when the NYPD came, they
did everything possible to try and dissuade him from making a report. To the
point where we had a mini confrontation with the cop in order to just get him
to file the paperwork. It really seemed like he had outside pressure put on
him to not file.

So I wouldn't be surprised if the NYPD is fudging the numbers somehow, though
homicide is a tough thing to hide in crime stats I'd imagine...

~~~
philwelch
In most places a physician has to sign a death certificate for every death.
The physician can either be the attending physician when the patient died
during care or a medical examiner otherwise. The death certificate often has a
place for "cause of death", and it's the medical examiner who officially
designates a homicide. So it's hard (though certainly not impossible) for
homicides to disappear from the records entirely.

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olympus
Everyone is so quick to try to assign cause to any phenomenon. I'm going to
remind everyone that correlation is a necessary but not sufficient condition
for causation, and there is often a significant time difference between the
cause and the effect. I'm not saying that the stop and frisk tactics did or
didn't work, but saying that stop and frisk wasn't the cause because stop and
frisks were lower in this time period isn't valid. Maybe the increased stop
and frisks in 2012 got the criminals off the street that were going to commit
murders in 2013. Again, I'm not saying that stop and frisk is a good or legal
idea, but the argument that some people are using to dismiss it is a flawed
argument and needs some more work.

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zaroth
Buried in the 2nd to last paragraph:

"The program relies heavily on tracking the online activities of neighborhood
gangs, in effect, trying to prevent shootings before they happen."

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drpgq
"Police officials also credited their efforts at identifying and monitoring
abusive husbands whose behavior seemed poised to turn lethal."

I found that interesting. I always felt that for domestics there wasn't a lot
you could do, but I guess that's not the case.

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bluedino
What's the drug scene like in New York these days? First you had heroin, then
the rise of crack cocaine, but since then the murder rate has gone lower and
lower (early 90's)

There's a very close link between the drug trade and inner-city murders.

~~~
wavefunction
This is an insightful post. The numbers posted above start at 1990 which was
the tail-end of the decades of heroin, cocaine and crack epidemics in NYC. It
looks like crime is back down towards a rate similar to 1965:

[http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm](http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm)

Not sure about the exactness of these statistics, just a quick google result
that seems legit.

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wavefunction
What the hell was this zeroed for? There is absolutely nothing in this post
that is factually incorrect or presented in an offensive manner.

HN really should show who's voting on posts.

~~~
lostlogin
I'm with you on that. Or it should force someone to comment if your down
voting, but that has notable drawbacks when a comment is just plain
inflammatory.

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ThomPete
One word...gentrification.

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pinaceae
419 murders in 2012 in NYC, 154 in 2013 already.

London had 99 murders in 2012.

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chaz
When did this become a contest?

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geogra4
NYC's extremely low murder rate for a big city in the USA is really nothing
special compared to other major cities world wide.

I think the context is useful in comparison.

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vacri
While the reduction is indeed something to be pleased about, remember that in
criminology, it's not unusual to see blips like this. It might be a blip, or
it might be the start of a new trend. Too early to tell.

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Sanddancer
This has been a very long running trend here. Since 1990, crime in US cities
in general has been dropping like a rock.

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vacri
Absolutely, but they haven't been dropping 25% every year. You still get
short-term rises and falls on long-term trends.

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zeroexzeroone
Runs faster in memory, allegedly.

