Mayor Adams and his new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, spoke with reporters this week to tout a reduction in crime in 2024 compared to 2023.
That is good news as far as it goes, but the reality of crime in New York City goes well beyond year-to-year comparisons.
Sure, if you moved into NYC in 2023, a 3% reduction in major crime is a relief.
But if you’ve lived here since 2019, you’ve seen a 30.5% increase in major crimes since that time.
Murder is up almost 20% since 2019, robbery up 25%, felony assault up 43%, burglary up 22%. Auto theft since that pre-pandemic year is up a whopping 163%.
All told, there were almost 29,000 more crime victims in 2024 than there were in 2019.
Bail reform resulted in the release of over 2,000 career criminals from city jails in the space of just a few months, from October 2019 to January of 2020 — exactly when NYC crime began its historic rise after almost 27 years of steady declines.
Now the increased crime levels caused by bail reform have become the “new norm,” the baseline we use for comparison.
It’s as if you had a 102-degree fever, and your doctor bragged about getting it down to 101. Our 2024 crime rate — again, 30.5% higher than 2019‘s — has become our new 98.6 degrees.
Adams and Tisch seem to get this. The mayor has been critical of bail reform in the past, and the commissioner wrote a column in The Post this week to plead with Albany for a change in the laws that have fueled the rise in crime.
Recidivism is up because the state legislature’s bail reform laws of 2019 don’t allow judges to remand dangerous defendants — and even when they can set bail, the crop of judges appointed by Bill de Blasio often refuse to do so.
The commissioner should continue publicizing the harm these laws have caused our city — and she has the tools to do it.
The NYPD’s weekly CompStat reports should compare today’s crime numbers with the same period in 2019, before the bail reforms, so that the people, the press and the governor can see how crime has increased since these laws took effect.
The NYPD knows who they arrest, the Department of Correction knows who is incarcerated, and the court system knows the release conditions that are set for every arrestee. Wouldn’t it be illuminating to see just how many recidivist defendants are released on their own recognizance every week — and what their records were?
The city could also publish statistics showing the criminal records of the people currently housed on Rikers Island, so the public can see exactly what kind of dangers may emerge when 2,500 of those held there are released due to its planned closure.
The mayor has all this data at his fingertips. The details are devastating to the pro-reform argument, and the public should hear them.
Our state politicians have never been held accountable for the damage they have done to this city.
Their pious demands for ending “mass incarceration” and fighting alleged racism in the criminal justice system have brought death and injury to the very people they profess to help.
The victims of violent crime in NYC are overwhelmingly black or Hispanic. They constitute about 50% of the city’s population — but according to NYPD statistics they account for 88.4% of murder victims, 94.7% of shooting victims, 78.2% of felony assault victims, 75.1% of rape victims and 70% of robbery victims.
To the progressive political class, these victims are an acceptable cost in their quest to achieve their purely ideological goal of reducing the jail population.
They haven’t got the courage to say that publicly, but they admit it in private — which is why they have to claim, incredibly, that releasing thousands of career criminals onto the street had nothing to do with the increase in crime, quoting phony, biased, ideological “studies” to back them up.
Adams and Tisch have the information to shame these politicians into taking the action needed to reduce crime, or face the wrath of their constituents. They must use it.
Distinguished economist Thomas Sowell once wrote, “It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.”
We have to keep trying, but boy did Sowell have it right.
Jim Quinn was executive district attorney in the Queens District Attorney’s Office, where he served for 42 years.
