New York, NY – the city is on track to set an all-time low homicide rate.
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Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said that crime in the city fell this year, marking the 17th straight year that major felony crime has declined.
The city is on course to have fewer than 500 homicides in 2007, surpassing all records for where comparable information is available.
"The new record low number of murders is truly a remarkable accomplishment for which the men and women of the Police Department should be justifiably proud," Kelly said. "But it's not about breaking records or crime suppression alone, it is all about saving lives."
Major felony crime has declined by more than 6 percent citywide compared to the same period in 2006, and by 26 percent since 2001. [wnbc]
He doesn’t live in Crown Heights, does he? If he did he’d be singing a very different tune.
Don’t kid yourself — without “St. Rudy,” as you sarcastically call him, crime does not start falling so dramatically in the first place — yeah, the murder rate would be down, as it is down generally in most American cities (most, but by no means all — read on) because of the aging population and the waning crack epidemic —
but only incrementally from what it was before (topping 2200 killings in 1991), with single-digit percentage decreases each year instead of the kind of sharp double-digit drops which we saw in New York and ONLY in New York.
Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly are essentially building on and extending the gains achieved by Rudy and his police commissioners, Bill Bratton, Howard Safir and yes, even Bernie Kerik, standing on their shoulders, if you will (and let’s give Mike and Ray some credit — they could have easily dropped the ball and destroyed whatever progress had been made in the preceding eight years).
Rudy and his guys broke the nearly universal extectations bandied about in the chattatering classes — the media, academia and the political and urban-policy wonk elite — that “nothing” could be done to stop violent crime, since in politically correct liberal theology, it was all tied up with solving all of the various social problems (poverty, racism, inequality, poor schools, lack of jobs, housing, etc, etc) first.
If David Dinkins had somehow defeated Rudy in 1993, chas v’sholom, even after having royally screwed up with the Crown Heights Pogrom and several other debacles like the Flatbush Korean deli boycott, we’d still be having well over 1,000 murders a year here and New York would be about as safe a city as, say, Philadelphia (a fraction of our population but several times our murder rate; they are on track to top 400 murders for a second straight year there) — meaning not safe at all.
who would have thought that crime going down in nyc in the years after 911 to unparalleled lows have nothing to do with saint rudy