Mayor Adams is right that New York is safer in some respects, but that smoothes over troubling trends.
The way Mayor Eric Adams talks about New York City crime has a bit of the short-order cook about it — numbers slung like hash. Vital City has been taking a look at the numbers because the mayor’s favorite mantra of “crime down, jobs up,” at least on the crime side, doesn’t square with New Yorkers’ jitters. In a 2023 Citizens Budget Commission Survey, just 51% of New Yorkers said they feel safe walking alone in their neighborhood at night, down from 70% in 2017.
Of course, elected officials don’t need to footnote their statements. But some modest connection to the facts on the ground would be good policy. And good policy should be good politics because people like to know the true score. Sometimes knowing the true score, even if it doesn’t match the triumphalist rhetoric, can make people more confident about riding the subway and walking in their neighborhoods. This is because understanding the real state of safety in the city permits New Yorkers to make their own well-founded judgments, unbuffeted by the hype of either gauzy good or hellishly horrendous.
A few days ago, testifying before the Financial Control Board, where numbers matter a lot, Adams touted that “crime fell overall for the seventh consecutive month. And then again on Tuesday at his weekly off-topic press conference, he burnished that record further by noting that "robberies are the lowest in recorded history.”
That sounds pretty good. And maybe there is some way to cut the numbers so it is true.
But from the numbers the City shares with the public, New Yorkers might be forgiven for scratching their heads in puzzlement.
Overall serious crimes (counted as seven major crimes of murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny auto) are virtually flat with last year (down 2.4%), and although rare crimes like murder (counted in the hundreds) are down, other violent crimes, like robbery and felony assault, counted in the thousands and tens of thousands, are up.
And are robberies the lowest they have been in recorded history? That’s actually not what the records say: 2023 posted the second-highest number of robberies since 2015 (2022 beat 2023 17,411 vs. 16,910), and this year so far the number of robberies is topping last year’s.
And here are a few more things that might account for why New Yorkers are concerned in spite of the mayor’s happy talk. All crimes — that’s both serious felonies and also all other kinds of misbehavior — for example, harassment, criminal mischief, the full gamut of drug crimes — stand at over a cool half million annually and are higher than they’ve been in a decade.
And serious felonies are higher than they’ve been since 2007.
The mayor has careened from painting his city as a horrendous hellscape (“never witnessed crime this bad” he said in May 2022, a year when murders stood at less than a quarter of the murders in the 1990s when Adams patrolled the street) to the current boosterism. This turn may reflect a fine political calibration, but neither is right. And being accurate, not slinging the hash, matters in figuring out how to reduce crime.
New York City has much to be proud of. We do have lower crime rates than other big American cities. We are doing much, much better than the peak crime period of the 1990s. But we would be wise to trim the rhetoric to fit the facts, so New Yorkers can rely on public officials and, significantly, so that the problems can be accurately diagnosed and addressed.