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Good news: In his first year, Mayor Eric Adams’ NYPD has managed to start bringing homicides down. Transit crime has been falling, too.
Bad news: On basically every other front, crime is winning.
It sure looks like the NYPD just lacks the resources needed for an across-the-board sea change, at least as long as the Legislature refuses to fix its disastrous criminal-justice reforms. And the mayor’s occasional claims that public fears about crime are just a “perception” are wildly false.
Major crimes — the ones most tracked by CompStat: murder, robbery, burglary, grand larceny, car theft and rape — hit 126,588, up 22.4% from 2021 and a post-2007 high. Every category except homicide last year topped the 2021 level.
And those categories don’t include a host of “non-major” felonies, such as criminal mischief, criminal contempt (typically for violating a judicial order) and dangerous-weapons complaints.
In all, the city last year saw more than 170,000 felonies reported, the most since it started releasing such stats in 2006. The record 172,852 for 2022 is up 20.4% from the 143,522 in 2021. (The 2006 total: 171,318 felony complaints.)
Meanwhile, misdemeanors in 2022 hit an eight-year high at 264,672 — including almost 100,000 complaints of harassment, plus more than 40,000 minor assaults.
Not to mention shoplifting, which is also setting records (over 63,000 in 2022, a 45% jump over 2021 and more than 2½ times the level of the mid-2000s) even though merchants increasingly don’t even bother reporting it.
Retailers tell The Post that nothing’s improved in the two months since the mayor’s high-profile December summit on the shoplifting catastrophe.
It’s not that cops aren’t trying. In 2022, they actually issued the most summonses since 2006, as well: 83,071.
But the Legislature’s reforms mean that 1) far fewer perps even qualify for remand (bail or jail), so all but the very worst offenders are free soon after any arrest, and 2) prosecuting anyone at all is far more difficult, so fewer-than-ever cases end with prison sentences, too.
Plus, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg fully buys into the pro-criminal ideology behind the state “reforms,” and most other DAs aren’t as far behind him as they should be.
All these stats show why the public in poll after poll ranks crime as its top concern, but few elected officials seem to care.
Adams (who’s staring at huge budget problems down the line) so far doesn’t seem interested in adding to the ranks of the NYPD. He boasts of his (real) progress on homicides, but we see no sign of a strategy to address how overall crime is still rising on his watch, even though he’s right to thunder about “recidivism”.
And Gov. Kathy Hochul is pushing some modest changes that she says will undo the worst damage of the state’s reforms, but the Legislature’s Democratic leaders aren’t buying it so far.
Which means that, as best we can tell, crime will keep on soaring, and regular citizens will keep on suffering and fuming, for the foreseeable future.
