Why Has New York City Defied the Great American Crime Decline?
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Crime is falling across the US, with the monthly totals through March published by the Real Time Crime Index showing violent crime back roughly at pre-pandemic levels while property crime is much lower. The violent crime decline appears to have accelerated over the winter.(1)
Crime has also been falling lately in the country's largest city. But the recent drop comes after years of increases, and crime remains much more prevalent in New York City than it was before the pandemic. Real Time Crime Index numbers are available only by state, but New York City represents 94% of the state population covered in these statistics, so they are a close enough approximation.
The property crime numbers show a similar split, but for simplicity's sake I will stick with violent crime from here on. Why is there still so much more of it in New York City than before the pandemic? The most honest answer is a shrug: Researchers are sometimes able to ascertain whether a particular policy or event increased or decreased crime, but definitive answers as to what caused a crime wave are awfully hard to find — and as a guy wielding line charts rather than sophisticated causal inference methods, I'm not going to offer one here. Still, the lines do offer more support for some theories than others, lending ammunition to critics of bail reform and Eric Adams but not those who blame the 'Ferguson effect' or Alvin Bragg.
One important detail to note is that while violent crime is up in New York City since before the pandemic, the most violent of crimes no longer is. If the 28.7% decline so far this year in murder and non-negligent manslaughter holds up, the city's murder rate will be the lowest since 1944.
Even when it spiked upward in 2020 and 2021, New York's homicide rate (homicide encompasses murder and non-negligent manslaughter) was among the lowest for a large American city. Coupled with its minuscule rate of traffic fatalities, this makes New York City in a sense one of the safest places in the US, a surprising result about which I have opined repeatedly in print and video. But the risk in New York of being a victim of violent crime, chiefly robbery or aggravated assault, is not especially low by big-city US standards, and as already noted is much higher than before the pandemic.
Aggravated assault's dominance of these statistics makes comparisons between cities a little iffy. Homicides hardly ever go unreported, assaults often do, plus police departments have some leeway in whether to report them as aggravated — defined by the FBI as 'an unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury' — or simple. Just to complicate things more, the NYPD in its own crime statistics counts felony assaults, which are less numerous than the aggravated assaults that the department eventually reports to the state and FBI and that I have had to estimate for the above chart. Reporting of rape is if anything even less consistent over time and across jurisdictions. All in all, I'm much more confident in the murder statistics showing New York City to be very much on the safe side for a big city than in the violent crime numbers showing it to be somewhat on the dangerous side.
Still, the larger numbers of aggravated assaults and robberies mean you're far more likely to experience them than murder, and comparisons of short and medium-term crime trends shouldn't be affected much by reporting inconsistencies. Here's a comparison of violent crime trends since the end of 2019 in New York and Minneapolis.
I picked Minneapolis because it's where George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in May 2020, and it became the epicenter of the protest movement and calls to defund the police that followed. There's now a fair amount of serious research linking public outrage over killings by police to crime increases as police pull back on enforcement in the face of protests and political backlash — the so-called Ferguson effect. One can certainly make the case that this helps explain what happened in Minneapolis from 2020 to 2022. But in New York, which also had huge protests in 2020, violent crime didn't start going up until 2021 and only really took off after city voters elected as mayor a former police officer who called for big increases in enforcement.
No, I don't think this means New York's crime wave was Eric Adams' fault, although it is striking how little success he has had in reining it in. Murder did go up sharply in New York City in 2020 and began falling in 2022, and the city's status as an early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic surely played a role in suppressing other violent crime in 2020 and 2021 because New Yorkers went out less and visitors stayed away. The crime wave was thus perhaps a delayed reaction to causes that predated Adams. One of those causes may simply have been the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on New York's daily routines and economic conditions. In the late 2010s, for example, the city's unemployment rate was nearly identical to the nation's. Since March 2020, it has been markedly higher.
Another elected official whose name comes up a lot in conjunction with New York's crime problems is Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a reformist progressive whose successful prosecution of President Donald Trump has made him a national target. Crime is indeed up in Manhattan since Bragg took office at the beginning of 2022, but it's up by more in the other four boroughs that together account for 80% of New York City's population, by much more in three of them. He's clearly not the culprit.
Bragg isn't the only progressive DA in New York City, though, and I don't think it's crazy to suspect that some aspects of the criminal justice reforms adopted over the past decade in New York by prosecutors, the city council and the state legislature might have boosted crime rates.
The highest-profile such reform in New York, signed into law by Governor Andrew Cuomo in April 2019, has been ending cash bail for all but the most serious felonies. There's persuasive evidence that for first-time offenders bail is counterproductive, as jail time increases the likelihood that they'll commit crimes again. But after the 2019 bail reform, judges in New York had limited leeway to jail repeat offenders they thought were likely to commit more crimes. By contrast, a 2017 bail reform in New Jersey was accompanied by a system of pretrial risk assessment aimed at keeping high-risk offenders behind bars while decreasing incarceration overall. County crime statistics, available through 2023, show markedly different trajectories in nearby New York and New Jersey jurisdictions.
These charts don't prove anything. Lots of other factors could be driving the divergence. But research by the Data Collaborative for Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York has found that, while recidivism is down among first offenders in New York since bail reform, it's up for repeat offenders. And data from the New York City Criminal Justice Agency show both the number and percentage of people on pretrial release in the city who are rearrested for felonies to be markedly higher in 2024 than in 2019. Bail reform flaws seem as if they could explain at least some of New York City's stubborn crime problem.
So what explains the decline in violent crime in the city over the past few months? Maybe several years of reforms to bail reform in Albany are beginning to have an impact. Maybe Jessica Tisch, whom Adams appointed as police commissioner in November, pretty much exactly when violent crime began to decline, really is doing a much better job than her predecessors. Another possible factor that I haven't mentioned — mainly because I don't have the data to chart it but also because the available evidence indicates that immigrants, including those here illegally, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans — is that the flow of asylum seekers into New York began to slow sharply last year.
Most likely it's some mix of these and other forces that will never be satisfactorily disentangled. In any case, let's hope it keeps up.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
(1) This chart represents the change in the number of crimes in 407 jurisdictions that provide timely monthly data; the US population has grown about 3% since 2020, so crime rates have likely fallen even more. Also, all the statistics I cite here represent crimes reported to the police. This isn't a perfect measure because not all crimes are reported the police, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that the percentage that are has been rising since 2020.
This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of 'The Myth of the Rational Market.'
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