Post-pandemic, it’s hard to get a clear read on the extent
to which violence is actually declining.
For the New York City Police Department, from the mid-1990s through the late 2010s, ringing in the New Year provided an opportunity to celebrate its achievements, usually in the form of crime declines. The yearly announcements of safer streets became something to which many of us New Yorkers grew accustomed; they also became something we’d take for granted. This exacerbated the shock of the city’s massive spike in serious violent crime in 2020, driven by upticks in homicides and shootings of nearly 50% and 100%, respectively. Homicides and shootings increased again in 2021, and 2022 saw major crimes spike 22% in the Big Apple while homicides fell 11%. The preliminary 2023 data show another nearly 12% decline in homicides, but an overall major crime figure that essentially held steady (down 0.3% for the year).
Recent crime increases have drawn heightened attention to the city’s year-end crime data for 2023. Everyday New Yorkers are looking to the data, hoping to find some signal of forthcoming relief, while criminal justice and police reform advocates are hoping to find evidence dissociating the last few years of crime data from their broader project. While we should all be encouraged by the recent declines in murders, there is also good reason to remain skeptical of those who’d have us believe that America’s largest city is out of the proverbial woods.
At the end of 2020, there was a good bit of particularly contentious disagreement about what to make of the national uptick in deadly violence that New York’s homicide spike was part of — especially since overall crime counts declined. The rancor owed to the fact that the spike coincided with efforts to defund police and radically transform criminal justice in the wake of the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis.
In a June 2021 Associated Press story, for example, University of Pennsylvania professor David Abrams noted that while homicides rose in 2020, there had been “no similar increase in other crimes, like burglaries, robberies or drug offenses,” which, he said, was “not what you’d expect if calls to defund the police were leading to a rash of crime.” He continued, “Any theory explaining the rise in homicides would also have to explain why we haven’t seen a spike in other kinds of crimes.” In the months before and after, mostly via Twitter (now X), I had been offering just such an explanation: The shift in what criminologists call “routine activities” — which took the form of more people spending more time at home due to the pandemic and less time on the street and in public transit systems — meant that there were simply fewer targets of crime in public spaces, such that the raw number decreases in crimes such as robbery may have nevertheless reflected an increase in the rate at which those opportunities for crime were converted into actual victimizations.
Just as the pandemic-era declines in the raw numbers of various crimes projected an inverted picture of actual victimization risks, the seemingly permanent shifts in office work and public transit use that came with the pandemic require us to dig deeper when trying to decipher the true meaning of last year’s crime data.
Later research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences and led by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Maxim Massenkoff and the University of Pennsylvania’s Aaron Chalfin, would lend support to this theory. Using mobility data from Chicago, Los Angeles and (importantly for the purposes of this piece) New York, Chalfin and Massenkoff explained why traditional crime rates “may present a misleading view of the recent changes in public safety,” highlighting that “after accounting for the fact that people were spending more time indoors in 2020,” crime data showed that “people in public spaces were 15 to 30% more likely to be robbed or assaulted.”
So what does this have to do with New York City’s 2023 year-end crime data? As I noted in testimony to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last November, a recent analysis done by the University of Toronto showed that foot traffic in the city’s business districts (based on mobile phone data) as of last summer was just two-thirds of what it was relative to 2019. Meanwhile, data from the MTA show that the city’s subway ridership was still down some 30% compared to pre-pandemic levels. Numbers also showed that Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road ridership were also well below pre-pandemic levels at various points last year. What about remote work? A survey done by the Partnership for New York showed that just 9% of Manhattan office workers were going in five days a week in early 2023, and just over half of them could be found at work on the average weekday. Then there’s the city’s recent population loss — down 5% between 2020-2022, with state-level data showing little signs of recovery in 2023.
New York City crime counts simply don’t tell as complete a story as they used to. Just as the pandemic-era declines in the raw numbers of various crimes projected an inverted picture of actual victimization risks, the seemingly permanent shifts in office work and public transit use that came with the pandemic require us to dig deeper when trying to decipher the true meaning of last year’s crime data.
In the end, what remains indisputable is that the city’s crime picture is both significantly worse than it was in 2019 and, by some measures, better than it was in 2020 and 2021.
The failure to do the work of introducing this particular bit of nuance into the mainstream conversation about crime in New York may explain why public sentiment in the city last summer did not seem to reflect the declines in certain crime categories.
Another contributor to the surface-level disconnect between what the numbers “show” and what New Yorkers say they “feel” might be the significant slowdown in police response times — particularly for low-priority calls. The city’s response time data show that the NYPD’s critical, serious and noncritical call response times have increased between January 2018 and December 2023 by 22%, 45.5% and 28.7%, respectively. For the latter category, wait times have risen to more than 27 minutes. As crime analyst Jeff Asher noted last year, “Longer response times reduce the likelihood that an incident will be successfully reported to police which in turn leads to crimes being undercounted.”
In the end, what remains indisputable is that the city’s crime picture is both significantly worse than it was in 2019 and, by some measures, better than it was in 2020 and 2021. Expect the tension between those who would emphasize the former and those who’d emphasize the latter to remain palpable, because winning the debate about what New Yorkers should make of the numbers will help determine whether city and state officials take up proposals to reprioritize traditional crime control measures. Many of us believe that doing so will be determinative of whether we can recapture the momentum the city seemed to be enjoying on the public safety front in the mid-2010s. Others remain convinced that the footprint of the institutions that constitute the city’s criminal justice system should continue to shrink. The safety of the city’s residents may (or may not) hang in the balance. Only time will tell.