The New York Times reports that New York City has logged 461 murders to date this year, potentially making 2009 the lowest number since record keeping began. Included in that number are some old cases, including a shooting that occurred in 1960 where the fellow died of infection in 2009. Another from a 1965 assault.
The lowest year, at least until the end of the week was 2007 with 496. Chances of racking up another 35 murders by Saturday don’t look good. The stats are interesting:
Most of this year’s victims — 283 of them — were killed with a gun fired by someone they knew. Others were stabbed (90 cases), hit with a blunt instrument (28) or asphyxiated (16). One victim was murdered with a car.
Only 34 percent of the victims, no matter how they died, were killed by strangers.
That last statistic, that 66% of victims were killed by someone they knew, is critical. While people continue to blindly accept the myth that we live in City plagued by violent, anonymous crime, it’s simply untrue. Watching “Like It Is” with Gil Noble a couple of Sunday’s ago, an activist argued for a community based program to stop the murders that plagued his neighborhood. There was a grand total of one this year.
The police, naturally, argue that this amazingly low rate reflects their great work. Maybe. Certainly, it doesn’t reflect that they haven’t done their job well, so there’s credit for the cops any way you look at it. And if 66% of all murders are committed by people who know their victim, there’s little the police could do to stop it in any event.
Doug Berman sees a similar lesson in these numbers for sentencing reform:
The police, naturally, argue that this amazingly low rate reflects their great work. Maybe. Certainly, it doesn’t reflect that they haven’t done their job well, so there’s credit for the cops any way you look at it. And if 66% of all murders are committed by people who know their victim, there’s little the police could do to stop it in any event.
Doug Berman sees a similar lesson in these numbers for sentencing reform:
First, New York state in recent years has been reducing its overall prison population and its incarceration rate. Second, the two federal districts that impose among the greatest number of below-guideline sentences are based on Manhattan and Brooklyn. Of course, based on these data, I would not make a bold claim that there is a direct causal link between more lenient sentencing outcomes and reduced crime. But I do think these NYC realities help refute the notion that crime reductions can only be achieved by more severe sentencing outcomes.
While reforms or reduced sentences may not be the cause of this atmosphere of reduced murder, they haven’t caused the sky to fall, as so many cry will happen every time someone suggests that the answer to every criminal problem isn’t more and lengthier incarceration.
The vast majority of murders, 283, were caused by gunshot. The police attribute the reduced rate to New York’s efforts to get guns off the street:
The vast majority of murders, 283, were caused by gunshot. The police attribute the reduced rate to New York’s efforts to get guns off the street:
Curbing gun use is linked to lowering the homicide rate, officials said, and Mr. Kelly lauded the mayor’s effort to stop illegal guns from flowing into New York, saying 90 percent of the guns that are confiscated after they are used in crimes come from out of state. He also cited the department’s program of questioning and frisking some people on the streets as a “lifesaving” strategy that had led to the seizure of 7,000 weapons this year, including 800 guns.It’s unfortunate that the Times neglected to flesh this claim out a little more, give that this “lifesaving” strategy involved 496,000 stops, of which more than 90% were black or Latino, and led to seizures of about 800 guns. Bear in mind that we’re still only talking about that 34% of murders between strangers here. That’s 620 unconstitutional stops for every gun taken off the street. Not an impressive result.
Still, the point that guns are effective weapons, turning an angry moment into a death, can’t be ignored. For all the bravado expressed by men (it’s almost always men, and usually from Texas) about how they want to have their gun close at hand so that they can kill anyone who steps on their lawn uninvited, neither your machismo nor your death penalty nor your stand-your-ground-castle-doctrine exists in New York. Yet you maintain blind faith in the benefits of killing others, and think New York City is a sewer of violence.
Maybe this is just one New Yorker’s view of the world, but we seem to be doing pretty well here without ever-harsher laws, the death penalty and he-men shooting stupid kids.
Some criminal defense lawyers will complain that these low crime rates are bad for business. Certainly it leaves lawyers with more free time on their hands, time that used to be spent defending accused murderers. Sanity tells us that we’re just going to have to live with that.
But this should put to rest any argument that the absence of “tough on crime,” increased criminalization and harsher penalties will lead to a plague of violence. It’s just another Menckian solution that appeals to the cowboys and simpletons.
Maybe next year, we could consider whether giving individuals accused of crimes their full panoply of constitutional rights would impact the murder rate? Maybe we will learn that judges can honor the Constitution without risking the downfall of society to a plague of violence. It seems that plagues aren’t what they used to be.
The percentages look awfully familiar to me; in most places in the US, a majority of murders are committed by somebody the victim knew, which includes the unlicensed pharmacists killed by known business competitors, as well as the boyfriend/girlfriend killed by an angry ex in their apartment. It’s the former kind of category (as well as the minority of stranger murders) that the small number of stop and frisks that find guns might affect, which depends a lot more on what happens to the person who has been found with the gun on him rather than getting the gun into the police property room.
Which doesn’t mean that the policy is constitutional, but it does mean that it’s not necessarily ineffective.
It’s not all that clear that either matters much. I suspect that it would be best for all involved if killing someone in the heat of the moment, whether dear friend, lover or stranger, was more difficult. I think back to West Side Story, when fists and maybe a chain were the weapons of choice. The zip gun, well, that was over the top. After all, it was about who owned the streets. Not something to die for.
Briliant post, thank you.
It would be great if it was difficult — or, better: impossible — to kill somebody out of the heat of the moment, and a gun can make that easier, and in some cases, does (viz. the Muhs shooting that kid over, well, literally nothing other than idiocy and anger); after all, we don’t hear a lot about road rage garottings. It also does make it easier — and, in some cases, possible — for somebody to protect himself or herself, and that happens, too, and apparently it happens a lot more often, and most often happens without anybody getting shot or killed. (Which is, I think, a good thing.)
As a policy matter, the people of New York City have decided to go for a very stringent form of gun control locally, and it clearly hasn’t caused NYC’s murder rate to rise above the much higher one of New Orleans (with much less stringent laws) or Chicago (with even more stringent ones).
If you folks were able to stop guns from being illegally smuggled in over the border, the number of killings with guns would go down; there’s far more murders with NY-registered guns in a slow season of Law & Order than there are in a decade of real life. But the regimen necessary to begin to do that would be difficult; airport-style security at the border, say.
“That’s 620 unconstitutional stops for every gun taken off the street”
Of these 620 stops, I wonder how many decent, non violent residents had an “unpleasant” experience with the police? Knowing how the NYPD treats people, I’d guess more then a few. So now you have hundreds more citizens who are less likely to call the police when they see something suspicious. In casting such a wide net, they’re only enabling the dangerous criminals to win.