“Part of the history of New York City’s revival as a city is that people are safe,” says Greenberg, who has studied the city’s crime data from this period. “Our findings suggest they are much safer, but not because of what the New York Police Department is doing.”
That conclusion, based on a paper recently published in the journal Justice Quarterly, is a pretty jarring one. It challenges widely held narratives of how New York won its war on crime. But it also raises awkward questions about the efficacy of certain police tactics everywhere, particularly “broken windows.” (“It’s a curiosity,” Greenberg adds, “that this name got attached to what the New York Police Department was doing, because the police never went after broken windows”).
Total crime decreased by 12.1 percent in 2012, which included a 1.2 percent drop in violent crime and a 13.1 percent reduction in property crimes, said Julian Miller, police spokesman. The number of crimes reported in the metro jurisdiction also bettered 2010, which was the previous lowest since the city annexed the southside areas south of Derenne Avenue in 1980. The jurisdiction includes the city of Savannah, the unincorporated areas of Chatham County and the town of Vernonburg. Lovett credited a bevy of causes for the decrease in crime – proactive patrols, surveillance details, heightened responses to calls and building better relationships with the community his department serves. It was the latter that he said brought the best results. Criminal reports fell in 15 of the 16 categories of crime composing Part 1 crimes. Only an increase in commercial robberies exceeded the number of calls in 2011 for that category.
View crime stats comparison by years and total jurisdiction crime stats for 2012 (pdfs).
Crime experts who attribute the drop in killings to better policing or an aging population fail to square the image of a more tranquil nation with this statistic: The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half.
“Did everybody become a lousy shot all of a sudden? No,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, a union that represents about 330,000 officers. “The potential for a victim to survive a wound is greater than it was 15 years ago.”
In other words, more people in the U.S. are getting shot, but doctors have gotten better at patching them up. Improved medical care doesn’t account for the entire decline in homicides but experts say it is a major factor.
Pottstown, Pennsylvania newspaper The Pottstown Mercury has begun sharing photographs of wanted individuals through the popular photo sharing service Pinterest.
Using photo sharing channels to increase the number of eyeballs seeing the photos is apparently working: the Pottstown police department reports that there has been a 58% uptick in arrests since the Mercury began sharing photos of perps through social media.
(via Perp Pics Posted to Pinterest Lead to an Uptick in Arrests)
Honduras, one of poorest and most crime-ridden countries in the Western Hemisphere, is taking drastic steps to save itself, agreeing to allow private investors to build three privately-run “model” cities within its borders.
The project “has the potential to turn Honduras into an engine of wealth,” an optimistic Carlos Pineda, a government official who helped secure a memorandum of understanding with MKG Group told the Associated Press Tuesday.
MKG has committed $15 million to the first planned city on the country’s Caribbean coast. Construction will begin in six months.
The cities will have their own laws, governments, police forces and tax systems. They will have the power to sign international trade agreements and set their own policies on immigration.
“If you ask people today what a street is for, they will say cars,” says Norton. “That’s practically the opposite of what they would have said 100 years ago.” Streets back then were vibrant places with a multitude of users and uses. When the automobile first showed up, Norton says, it was seen as an intruder and a menace. Editorial cartoons regularly depicted the Grim Reaper behind the wheel. That image persisted well into the 1920s.
Crime in the area patrolled by Savannah-Chatham police is at its lowest point in recorded history, according to a news release from the department Wednesday.
West Virginia has launched a smartphone app that’s one part clever crowdsourcing and community engagement and one part sinister report-on-your-neighbor Big Brotherism. The Suspicious Activity Reporting Application is exactly what it sounds like. See something that looks like a violation of the law, no matter how insignificant? Snap a pic, tag it with GPS, and anonymously report it to the state.
When Laura Amico launched the website Homicide Watch D.C., her intent was to create a comprehensive record of all the murders in the District. Little more than a year later, the site has become more than a somber document for posterity: it’s a bona fide newsbreaker, often identifying victims before police do.
