I wanna wake up in a city that never sleeps and not be sexually violated.
New Year/new me, and one of my resolutions is to be less negative (although stepping away from booze for the past 3 days certainly hasn’t helped). So here’s an incrementally positive tidbit about a city I tend to hate for some random chit-chat fodder at the water cooler.
NYC’s mayor, Bill de Blasio is beating his chest again like a confused-but-proud gorilla after the NYC crime stats for last year have come in, and New York City has officially been the proud destination for less than 300 murders in all of 2018!
This drop is continuing an over 25-year trend that began through Giuliani’s 8-year run and then Bloomberg’s 12-year term before BdB took hold of the city 4 years ago. For reference, there were exactly 289 murdered last year compared to over 2,200 in 1990, which was David Dinkin’s first year as mayor and also my first year commuting into Manhattan’s blighted and murder-y Lower East Side every fucking day for high school.
The headline I read last night on the AP wire (attached above) and elsewhere touts the Big Apple as last year’s “safest big city in America“. New York’s murder rate hovered just above 3 unlucky bastards killed per 100,000 people in 2018, well below the three other largest American cities… LA’s murder rate is slightly over 6 killed per 100,000, Houston’s rate is just over 14, while just under 20 Chicagoans are slaughtered per 100,000 for a comparison.
I was kind of surprised by this, to be honest. I am the first to shit on this city for the fact that it is so disease-and-douchebag-ridden and expensive, but the numbers don’t lie. You were 6 times more likely to get killed in the Windy City last year than you were right here in this little pricey cesspool we call home.
For those of you who want to see all the numbers, here are the official New York City Crime Statistics for 2018:
Crime Category…………2018………..2017………Change
Homicides……………………..289……………292…..-1.7 percent
Robbery…………………….12,856……….13,956…..-7.9 percent
Burglary……………………11,630………..12,122…..-4.1 percent
Shootings………………………753…………….787…. -4.4 percent
Grand Larceny Auto……5,424………….5,650….-4.0 percent
Grand Larceny………….43,422……….43,257….+0.4 percent
Rapes…………………………1,788………….1,466…..+22 percent *
Overall…………………95,509………96,845….-1.4 percent
I put an asterisk next to the rape line because I found it jarring that the handful of articles I read since last night did not put any focus on that significant double-digit statistical jump.
I certainly don’t want to tell the mayor how to do his job, but you may want to hold off on the victory parade for a whopping 1.4 percent drop in overall crime until we get a handle on the 22% LEAP in the number of rapes that took place in New York last year. It appears to be the crime statistic equivalent of the old equity trading adage to describe a stock that goes up a dollar in price before cratering 20%- “Eat like a bird. Shit like an elephant.”
Maybe (hopefully) part of that rape jump can be attributed to the #metoo movement giving women (and a couple of dudes) more courage to come forward, but +22% is a big number no matter how you slice it, so whoever is allocating resources at the NYPD, you might want to shift some bodies back over to SVU on the hop. Otherwise, it looks like you moved the lifeguards into the cafeteria to prevent fat kids from choking on donuts, while 10 times as many young ladies were left drowning in the deep end.
Happy New Year, NYC… Be better.
Take a report.
-Large