New York City, once widely feared for its mean streets scarred by random violence, is on course for its lowest murder rate in four decades with this year’s total expected to be below 500.
Aided by burgeoning affluence and a decade of ”zero-tolerance” policing, a steady decline in the Big Apple’s violent-crime rate has left the city basking in a new-found glow of safety. Criminologists suggest that killings by strangers have become so rare that the police cannot reasonably be expected to stamp out the problem any further.
Since the beginning of the year, the New York police department has recorded 428 murders compared with 579 for the whole of 2006. Only 35 of these deaths were at the hands of complete strangers, while the rest arose from personal disputes such as romantic tiffs, gang warfare or confrontations with acquaintances.
In a city of 8,2-million people, the chance of being murdered has fallen to one in 17 000. The figures are a far cry from the dark days of 1990 when a record 2 245 people were murdered as an epidemic of crack-cocaine abuse gripped New York.
The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, routinely trumpets New York’s re-emergence as ”the safest big city in America” and has been trenchant in defending a ban on carrying hidden weapons, which enrages the American gun lobby.
The drop in crime took root under the leadership of Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, who instituted a sweeping crackdown on drug abuse and antisocial behaviour.
Initiatives introduced to lower the crime rate included a hi-tech analytical tool, Compstat, which gave the police early warnings of any changes in local crime trends. A scheme called ”operation impact” periodically flooded high crime spots with swarms of officers handing out on-the-spot summonses, while changes to the criminal justice system gave longer sentences to repeat offenders.
Falling crime
The lower murder rate is one element in a broader picture of falling crime. The overall rate of crime has fallen by 6,47% this year, with falls in the number of rapes, robberies, car thefts and burglaries. Tourism chiefs were quick to leap on the figures.
”I don’t think you could wish for a better situation than this,” said Christopher Heywood, a spokesperson for the city’s marketing board, NYC & Company. ”Crime is one of those things at the top of any visitor’s list as they consider a destination. This is very good news for New York’s $24-billion tourism industry.”
The number of killings in 2007 is likely to be the lowest since the authorities began keeping reliable records in 1963. Peter Manning, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston, told the New York Times that with the vast majority of the remaining murders committed in homes or semi-private places, there was little more that could be done to cut the rate any further. ”What are you going to do, send cops to every house?”
”We know that, historically, homicide is the least suppressible crime by police action,” he added. ”It is, generally speaking, a private crime, resulting from people who know one another and have relationships that end up in death struggles at home or in semi-public places.”
The crime crackdown is not without its critics. The New York Civil Liberties Union has accused the police of using racial profiling to stop and search pedestrians. Last year, officers stopped people on the streets on 508 540 occasions. The union said that complaints against the force receive only cursory examination and that punishments for misdeeds by police officers are often lenient.
Occasional high-profile incidents still make headlines. A homeless man, Kenny Alexis, terrified bystanders by stabbing four people apparently at random around Times Square last year. This week, four men were jailed for chasing a gay man to his death in traffic on a busy Brooklyn highway after luring him through an internet chat room.
New Orleans, scarred by Hurricane Katrina, at present holds the mantle of the United States’s murder capital.
New York is also making progress in shedding another unfortunate association — rudeness. A Reader’s Digest survey this year named the Big Apple’s residents as the most courteous out of 35 global cities after testing how many people held open doors, said ”thank you” and helped to pick up fallen papers. — Guardian Unlimited Â