New York City voters will finish choosing their Democratic mayoral candidate in primary elections tomorrow. With no strong Republican candidates, the winner of the primary is widely expected to become the next mayor of the country’s biggest city.
Recent polls have consistently shown that the top issue for New York City voters in the mayoral race is crime. And in a tight race, that emphasis appears to be giving the edge to Brooklyn Borough president and former NYPD officer Eric Adams, who strongly opposes the Defund the Police movement.
Rise in (some) crime
While there have been more murders so far this year in New York City (194) than in any other year of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure, that’s well below how many were committed in the same period in every year of Rudy Giuliani’s two terms as mayor, and fewer than in that time frame in nine of Michael Bloomberg’s 12 years in office.
But why do voters rank crime at the top of their list? It’s true that some crimes have increased since the start of the pandemic. NYPD CompStat data show that there have been 194 murders so far this year in New York City, a pretty sharp increase over the past two years; there had been 171 murders at this point last year, and 127 in the same period in 2019. Shooting incidents likewise are up this year.
But while murders get the most attention, they’re also the rarest violent crime in NYC. Robberies are at their lowest point in decades, and misdemeanor assaults are sharply down the past two years; the 2021 rate so far is 22% lower than at this point in 2019. Felony assaults are up, but only 2% from the most recent 5-year average. (These disparities are consistent with crime increases being primarily driven by record levels of gun purchases, rather than by the reforms of policing that are often blamed for the rise in the murder rate.)
Looking just a bit farther back, you can see that New York is nowhere near its “bad old days” of crime. In 1993, the earliest year for which the NYPD provides year-to-date crime numbers, there were 718 murders at this point in the year—3.7 times higher than today. In fact, the current number is just a hair higher than the 191 to this point in 2012—a year when murders reached a record low, and then–Mayor Michael Bloomberg touted it as “the safest big city in America” (Gothamist, 12/28/12).
The overall crime numbers, combining the seven major crimes the NYPD tracks, are lower so far this year than any previous year, and less than a third their year-to-date total in 1996, the earliest year with such totals in CompStat (and a year when the city’s population was roughly a million people smaller than its current 8.4 million).
Brutal rent burdens
Evictions in New York City are heavily concentrated in Black and Latinx neighborhoods. (Source: Furman Center)
Meanwhile, New York City has long been facing a serious housing crisis. The number of single adults in shelters has reached record levels, public housing has faced a string of scandals (Politico, 8/14/20) and tenants continue to face punishingly high rents. Two-thirds of city households rent their homes, and in the past 10-15 years, incomes have not kept pace with rent increases. As a result, fully half of renters are considered “rent burdened,” meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. A majority of those making less than $50,000 a year are severely rent burdened, spending more than half their household income on rent (Furman Center, 3/24/20, 2020).
The pandemic did send some residents fleeing and helped bring rents down a bit in certain areas. Those who left were mostly middle- and upper-income households, and most of the rent softening was concentrated in Manhattan and high-end markets (CNBC, 10/31/20). But for many renters, the past year was brutal: Households owing back rent saw their rental arrears spike by 66%, and the number of households with extreme rent debt doubled (Furman Center, 2020).
New Yorkers’ odds of being severely rent burdened are about 1 in 6, and of being in extreme debt to a landlord about 1 in 9. By comparison, the chance of being murdered in New York City last year was less than 1 in 18,000; the chance of being shot was less than one in 5,000.
Tabloids’ crime compulsion
Daily News front pages (11/23/20) focused on crime even more than the New York Post.
Yet the city’s two big tabloid dailies—which offer far more local coverage than its biggest paper, the New York Times—paint a dramatically different picture. Both papers gave far more coverage to crime than to the affordable housing crisis in the past year.
FAIR searched the Nexis news database for New York Post and New York Daily News articles that included the terms “crime,” “affordable housing,” “supportive housing,” “rent control” or “eviction,” from 6/18/20 through 6/18/21. The Daily News ran 1,365 stories that mentioned crime and only 166 that mentioned these housing crisis terms, a ratio of roughly 8 to 1; at the Post, the difference was 1,696 to 182, or closer to 10 to 1.
As stark as they are, those numbers don’t take into account front pages—the most visible and often most sensationalist part of the papers. And stories of violence appeared again and again on page 1 throughout the past year: 85 times at the Daily News and 57 times at the Post. By comparison, stories about the housing crisis–mostly dealing with homelessness–appeared 12 times on the front page of the Daily News and just twice on the Post‘s page 1.
At the Daily News, readers were treated to such front-page headlines as:
- “Carnage and Chaos; Shootings, Slayings Soar Over the Last Year; City EMS Crews Stressed to Crisis Levels” (11/23/20)
- “Guns Blaze in Bronx; Like the Wild West as Cop Shooter Is Killed; 2 Marshalls, 1 Finest Hurt” (12/5/20)
- “New Year Same Fear; No Letup From 2020 Mayhem as Bullets Ring Out After Ball Drops” (1/2/21).
The New York Post (5/10/21) not-so-subtly linked its support for Eric Adams to its sensationalized crime coverage.
Meanwhile, the Rupert Murdoch–owned Post, lacking any viable Republican candidate to endorse, ran a front-page endorsement of Adams on May 10, featured on the top half of the page; the bottom half blared: “I Don’t Want to Die: Mom Shot in Times Square; No One Would Even Help Me.” The day before (5/9/21), the paper had given the Times Square shooting front-page status (“Times Square Mayhem”), and two days before that (5/7/21), the front-page headline was “War on Our Streets; DA: Gang Battle Behind Killing of 1-Year-Old.”
(The Post took a break from front-page crime stories on May 8 to announce, “Companies Go Begging as Rich Benefits Keep Workers Home.”)
Other notable recent front-page crime headlines from the Post: “Kill or Be Killed” (4/12/21), “Knife Horror on Subway” (5/15/21) and “Stop the Bloodshed” (with the accompanying editorial teased below: “This Is Why Vote for Mayor Matters”—5/19/21).
Sympathy for the landlord
A rare example of a New York Post article (3/14/21) expressing sympathy for a homeless person.
Similar front-page histrionics over the housing crisis could not be found at either paper. Even the Post‘s paltry number of mentions of the housing crisis overstate its attention to renters’ plight, as the paper’s definition of “crisis” when it comes to NYC housing is quite different from most New Yorkers’. You’ll rarely find the paper covering—let alone lamenting—the situation facing low-income renters. Indeed, a great many of the Post articles we counted argue against things like rent control and the eviction moratorium, and paint landlords as the primary victims of any housing crisis.
To wit: A Post editorial (4/25/21) blasted a rent-control bill “that would clobber the housing market,” arguing that rents “have plunged to decade-long lows.” The tabloid ran an article (3/13/21) about a landlord who lives in her car because she’s been unable to evict her “deadbeat tenant” under the Covid eviction moratorium. “Kill the Rent Laws Now,” blared another editorial (10/25/20).
Covering the news that almost 1 in 5 rent-regulated tenants in New York City were more than two months behind on rent, the Post turned this into a story about the landlords who were owed the rent, quoting only a landlord interest group and a landlord’s daughter (“We have nothing. We are completely destitute.”).
In the Daily News‘ reporting on the eviction moratorium, which constituted a large chunk of its housing coverage, it typically offered up quotes from both tenants and landlords (e.g., “‘I don’t like owing anybody’: NYC tenants hail pandemic-related rent relief, but landlords remain skeptical,” 4/11/21). The editorial page (8/7/20), arguing for Congress to extend the federal eviction moratorium in August, did talk about “the enormity of the housing crisis”— though related only to the pandemic, and not NYC-specific—but it hasn’t mentioned affordable housing issues since last September.
In the paper’s endorsement (5/15/21) of centrist Kathryn Garcia—which it found only “a cut above Adams, and head and shoulders over the others”—the editorial board highlighted budget shortfalls, education, public safety and climate change as the major issues facing the next mayor, writing that “incidents of scary, random violence seem to be on the rise.”
As the saying goes, “if it bleeds, it leads.” One can imagine attention-grabbing coverage of the housing crisis—there’s no shortage of human tragedy in that story—but the real estate industry has long been a major newspaper advertiser, and a major political force in New York City in general. Story after story about people losing their homes or overwhelmed by rent debt don’t sit well next to cheery ads for new luxury apartments in the real estate section.
If they did, people’s perceptions of the top issues facing the city might look very different—and so might the mayoral race.
Research assistance from Steven Keehner and Elias Khoury.
If it bleeds, it leads
Unless it’s landlords doing the bleeding
There’s ONE single story in NYC. How Cuomo, Trump, de Blasio (Fauci, Barbot) ALL media, private equity medical, FIRE Sector, PhARMA… managed to kill >33K and indenture chronically ill survivors into a 1099 gig downward spiral, and we’re not allowed to discuss it. Because we were all told to, “just go on about your lives like normal,” and mostly poor, Black, immigrants were dying, while Creative Class and yuppie boomers could stay home, make soup, bread, gelato while watching their “disruptive” NASDAQ equities bounced-back ~80%, streaming Netflix and cheering “nothing, fundamentally changing!” Nobody wants to harsh their buzz, or chance a general strike (“looting”), protests (“rioting”) or dissent over our betters’ Great Reset Catastrophe Capitalism feeding frenzy!
Tim, you’re full of idiotic fascist shit NOBODY ever believed. I’d a relative in the Waffen SS, a girlfriend who’s mom was Bund Deutscher Mädel, uncles in 21st Pzr & Kreigsmarine and NONE of them EVER believed the silly-ass racist drivel white-flight suburbanite wannabe ubermensch ‘Murikanz buy-into to suck up for their trickle-down. It’s inbred, craven wet-brained MAGA imbeciles, that keeps “white” folks from seeing just how fucked we ALL are buy your beloved Massa. Buddy, your servile brainwashing ain’t helping us at ALL?
Research the USS Comfort.
Research black unemployment during Trump’s tenure.
Read. It might help.
“When does personal responsibility enter the picture?”
Or to put it another way, “Hey poor people, when are you going to stop being poor?”
Or interpreted by a reasonable person: These poor people made poor decisions early on in life. They are no longer able to land the well paying jobs that are available. Exactly whose fault is that if it’s not theirs?
Ha ha ha what a farce….“These poor people made poor decisions early on in life.”
Yeah right fuckstick….as if being born into a poor family is a personal choice….get the fuck outta here with your FOX News horse shit mentality.
Most likely what happened was this:
The poor person’s mother was pressured into unprotected sex by an abusive and manipulative man-boy, she then got pregnant, and because the state where she lived was Right Wing Fascist, her unrepresentative state legislature, through a targeted, ideologically driven, pseudo-religious-agenda, has reduced the number of abortion clinics down to one in operation.
So this poor young women, was basically forced into having a child she: (1) did not plan on getting pregnant with
(2) had no way of safely and legally aborting
(3) who is now on FAIR’s website talking shit to a right-wing-troll named Tim, tim or whatevah!
LOL. Maybe you should have picked a better date.
I take it you’d rather have been aborted. Your mother couldn’t have put you up for adoption? Who knows, maybe you would have thought more clearly.
We’re apparently the Insurrectionist terrorists, now? If we object to elected officials, media, our bosses, landlords… colluding to financialize our being FED to a frigging virus (brought here, by commercial class, unchecked by TSA) to flip dead loved ones’ apartments, exponentially indenture “essentials” with surprise ER, ICU & drug bills, to 1099 us out of rip-off ACA plans, any livable minimum wage, overtime, unemployment & part-out Social Security, Medicare… we’re just more Palestinians, super-predators, convict labor for our tag-team Idiocracy to extract?
://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/22/so-much-of-what-the-cia-used-to-do-covertly-it-now-does-overtly/
https://theintercept.com/2021/06/22/socialists-counterterrorism-political-terrorists-navy-antifa/
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-maddows-viewers
https://mobile.twitter.com/SeivwrightTrudy/status/1407285117891092482
https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1407567111220776961
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-tree-pollen-sars-cov-particles-virus.html
https://mobile.twitter.com/AliceFromQueens/status/1407625179707150336
Tim,
Better question: which is affecting more people? That is generally the definition of what is “newsworthy”.
This isn’t to say that death isn’t newsworthy, but you don’t seem to care that the increase in rents, which affects significantly more people, won’t lead to homelessness/death, which it empirically HAS in the past.
Whether the government does anything about this, this is a REAL crisis, getting very little reporting, despite affecting significantly more people.
As for the government stepping in, you just decided that the only solution was to punish the landlords. CA just “Stepped in” and paid rents for tons of folks, and the money went to their landlords.
See? The government saw a problem, listened to everyone, and made a decision that helped out everyone in the situation.
I get that this probably makes you made, because there seems to be nothing that more infuriates you than a functioning government, but the example is fairly clear.
California is just one state. Their are 49 others. Who exactly is paying the tab? Taxpayers. Exactly why should I as a taxpayer pay somebody else’s rent?
I don’t mind a well functioning government. They seldom are well functioning. I also want as little of them in my life as possible.
The government created the problem. 1) Fauci likely funded the gain of function research. 2) The government suspended enforcing private contracts!
I agree that things that affect people is newsworthy. Quantity and quality are BOTH important. I think murder is at the top. Most people would rather have their rent raised than be murdered.
Drugs are the largest cause of homelessness, not rising rents. If you’d like to look into how to solve that, I’d be interested.
I don’t care that rents are rising. I do care that qualified people aren’t able to buy houses (the cause for rising rents). I don’t care if non-qualified people can’t buy a house.
A point we can probably agree on: large corporations are buying up houses making it difficult for qualified people to buy houses. I don’t think this is good for our society. I would support looking into this and looking for a solution.
How often do you plan to be wrong, Tim?
“Drugs are the largest cause of homelessness, not rising rents.”
Absolutely dead wrong.
https://nlchp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Homeless_Stats_Fact_Sheet.pdf
OK. I didn’t state my case clearly enough. Long term homelessness is drug related (14%). Job related is (22%), but that is short term in nature. Drug problems are not short term. Half of the homeless are homeless due to choices. Knowing Comment, they aren’t responsible for their choices. Gee Officer Krupke.
Tim seems to neglect the main thrust of the reporting which is that the murder rate in NYC is not an outlier compared to other recent mayors’ tenure.
“While there have been more murders so far this year in New York City (194) than in any other year of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure, that’s well below how many were committed in the same period in every year of Rudy Giuliani’s two terms as mayor, and fewer than in that time frame in nine of Michael Bloomberg’s 12 years in office.”
Also, never mind the record numbers of LEGAL gun purchases during the pandemic, right? All of those guns remain in the hands of “good guys” and never make it to the streets /s.
Tim:
As usual, you are the one that is full of crap.
Gain of Function vis-a-vis Fauci: debunked here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-gain-function-covid/
And here is the actual story on the USS Comfort: at first, they weren’t allowed to take COVID-19 patients. Sounds like by the time they had reconfigured it, the Hospitals were up to speed on it. Not clear there, but at no point did the city mayor or Governor PREVENT it from doing its job: https://www.businessinsider.com/usns-comfort-nyc-coronavirus-timeline-2020-4?op=1#that-same-day-before-the-ship-started-taking-coronavirus-patients-a-crew-member-tested-positive-for-the-disease-this-is-despite-the-fact-that-the-crew-was-ordered-to-quarantine-for-two-weeks-before-their-departure-9
Jobs aren’t the only thing that matters to black people. Surviving COVID would be nice: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/23/health/covid-deaths-shifting-younger-more-disparities/index.html
Having a DOJ that was willing to do its job would be good too: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/11/opinions/trump-barr-undercutting-doj-civil-rights-division-clarke/index.html
Snopes is a left wing site. You didn’t watch his own videos on gain of function? What do you do, watch MSNBC or CNN all day. Those videos are easy to see. You can watch HIM talk about it.
Read his emails. I read the other side. You clearly don’t.
To survive COVID, blacks could do what everyone else did that survived it. We don’t set up a two tier system, one for whites and one for blacks. Why do liberals keep trying to bring back Jim Crowe?
So the Comfort off loaded patients? That gave hospitals more room to treat COVID. What exactly is your point? Trump sent it in. Philo said Trump didn’t do anything. That was wrong.