NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Crime rates continued to climb in the latest data released by the NYPD this month, and experts disagree on how to address the increase.
Murders are down 12% since the same date last year, but assaults are up 20% and robberies are up 42%.
Mayor Eric Adams has long sounded the alarm over crime in New York City — framing himself as the law-and-order candidate in the 2021 Mayoral election.
The majority of voters feel Adams has failed to live up to his promise to curtail crime.
About 49% of New York City voters said crime is the issue they are most concerned about in a Quinnipiac University poll released in early May. About 54% of voters disapprove of Adams’ handling of crime.
While crime rates are on the rise recently, crime is still relatively low when examined on a longer timeline.
The rates for the seven major offenses were lower in 2021 than every year from 2000 through 2015. Since the turn of the century, only 2016 through 2020 had lower crime rates, and, even then, not by much.
Murder has declined 78% since 1990. April saw a decrease of 12% from the previous year.
NYPD Chief of Department Terry Monahan pointed fingers at bail reform and falling NYPD enlistment rates.
“If you get arrested for stealing a car, you get what’s called a desk appearance ticket. You’re out on the street immediately,” said Monahan.
A study from the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-profit connected to the New York University School of Law, found that bail reform has had no impact on violent crime rates.
Across nearly 100,000 cases where someone was released pre-trial due to the change in bail laws between July 2020 and June 2021, only 429 cases led to a rearrest for a violent felony involving a firearm, according to the Albany Times Union. That number represents just 2% of total cases.
Roughly one-fifth of all cases resulted in a re-arrest for misdemeanors or non-violent felonies.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander released a report based on this data that found “the share of people awaiting trial in the community who are rearrested remained nearly identical before and after the implementation of bail reforms.”
Liz Glazer, former federal prosecutor, Deputy Secretary for Public Safety for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the head of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Office of Criminal Justice, told WCBS 880’s Peter Haskell that she sees the pandemic as driving the increase.
“NYC had one of the lowest crime and incarceration periods between 2017 and 2019. When the pandemic hit, shootings doubled, and they’ve essentially stayed there since then,” said Glazer. “We are about where we were in Mayor Bloomberg’s time as far as murders and shootings go.”
Liz Glazer said that, as the pandemic and police misconduct have shaken the public’s trust in law enforcement, police are solving less crimes than ever.
“In the best of times, New York City had solved about half of its shootings,” said Glazer. “During the pandemic, in some neighborhoods — particularly these very poor neighborhoods largely home to Black and brown New Yorkers — that clearance rate, that solve rate, sank to 20%.”
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