New York City police: Statistics suggest that the less they police, the less police brutality they engage in. (cc photo: Torbakhopper)
The Wall Street Journal (5/14/15) reported that the number of complaints by civilians about New York City police officers has fallen to its lowest level in 12 years. Reporters Pervaiz Shallwani and Josh Dawsey wrote:
The Civilian Complaint Review Board said it received 4,788 complaints against New York Police Department officers in 2014, an 11 percent decrease from 2013. Through the first four months of this year the number of complaints fell from 1,776 to 1,290.
The report attributed the drop in complaints to a decline in the number of interactions the NYPD has had with the public, including the number of times officers stopped and frisked people and the number of arrests and summonses officers handed out.
There’s a logic there: fewer interactions with police, fewer brutal interactions with police, all else being equal. But the Journal seems to suggest that there’s a price to pay in terms of the job that the police are supposed to be doing:
The 110-page report comes as the city is embroiled in a debate over police interactions with the community, particularly in poor and minority neighborhoods. It also came a day after a poll found that the majority of New Yorkers support “broken windows” policing, the theory that going after small crimes prevents much larger ones.
Later, the piece makes the point that the police under New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (who took office at the beginning of 2014) do not in fact seem to be going after small crimes as much:
Stop and frisks have dropped dramatically after reaching a peak of nearly 700,000 in 2011. Arrests have dropped in part due to a change in how officers give citations for marijuana and criminal summonses, police say, because of a larger emphasis on officer discretion.
That would mean that larger crimes are going unprevented—if the theory of “broken windows” is correct, that is.
But is it? There’s only one paragraph in the piece that tries to answer the question of whether the decrease in complaints about police is related to a decrease in police effectiveness. And it tries to answer that question through polling:
Policing has become somewhat of a sore issue for the mayor. Almost 90 percent of the city’s residents say they are worried about crime, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, and a majority don’t agree with how Mr. de Blasio has handled policing issues, recent polls show.
New York Times photo of New York Police Commissioner William Bratton in Times Square. (photo: Kevin Hagen/Getty Images)
That’s an odd approach, given that the NYPD releases detailed statistics on the actual amount of crime in the city—and they show that, over the same time period when New York’s police have been making fewer stops and fewer petty arrests, major crimes are down. Here’s a write-up of the latest annual statistics in the New York Times (12/31/14):
The number of murders in New York City has dropped to what years ago would have seemed like an impossible low: 328 killings recorded in 2014, the lowest figure since at least 1963, when the Police Department began collecting reliable statistics….
Reports of major crimes citywide continued their yearlong decline, to 105,428 through Dec. 28, from 110,728 in the same period in 2013, according to Police Department statistics. Murders dropped from 335 in 2013….
The number of robberies, a bellwether crime that erodes public perception of safety, reached their lowest levels yet recorded, 16,326 through Dec. 28, down 14 percent from 2013. The high point for robberies came in 1981, when the police recorded 107,495.
So the Journal article left out arguably the most interesting part of the story: The NYPD’s backing away from stop-and-frisk and reduced interest in small-time busts was accompanied by a 5 percent reduction in major crimes—in direct contradiction to what one would predict from the “broken windows” theory that is still the official crime-fighting ideology of New York City.
Indeed, the Times story, citing a professor of public policy, points out that “despite a continuation of the steep drop in recorded stop-and-frisk encounters, the department’s philosophy of crime prevention has remained the same between the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations.” The city’s newspapers likewise seem reluctant to let evidence get in the way of a deeply held worldview.
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So, perhaps the corpress are less heartened by a reduction in crime
Than they are concerned over a reduction in control?
@ Doug – Precisely, it is not crime they worry about, since that is the excuse and handle they use to ‘control the rabble’ – pardon my borrowing from Chomsky.
It brings to mind the episode of “Brother Cadfael” where he was constantly berating his helper who was clumsy as all get out. Cadfael was going into a tizzy because he was going to have to go away for a short time, and figured he would came back to a wiped out hut and supplies he was making (he was the one monk who knew his herbs, and made the medicines for the monastery and town). Only when he came back, the place was perfect and nothing was broken or ruined, and it finally dawned on him that he was the main cause of the young mans clumsiness because he was always hovering and pushing.
The Police need to realize that mostly the little shit will take care of itself, and they need to knock the big moles that pop up, not run around trying to put out little brush fires. The Major News media however will never realize that, since they are little more than Cheer Leaders for the current Crop of Dictators.