New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio holds a press conference to announce a definitive plan to close the Rikers Island Correctional Facility within ten years, in New York, March 31, 2017. Albin Lohr-Jones/Press Association. All rights reserved.For the first time since the 1950s, fewer than three hundred murders were recorded in New York last year. The number of manslaughters, rapes, assaults, robberies, burglaries, grand larcenies and car thefts also reached a historic low. In total, fewer than 100,000 of these serious crimes were reported.
Compare that to 1990, the worst year on record, when police tallied 2,245 homicides and more than 520,000 major felonies. A fivefold reduction in crime is a huge achievement, without precedent in the developed world. It is easy to forget that New York was once synonymous with urban decay and inner city violence.
Speaking on All Things Considered as the year drew to a close, Bill Bratton, who served as Commissioner of the New York Police Department (NYPD) from 1994-96 and 2014-16, was understandably happy to claim some of the credit. Police “began to focus on disorder, which had not been addressed at all in the '70s and '80s, and disorder is described as broken windows, quality of life, minor offences,” he said.
