After numerous local, state and federal reforms, crime hits new record lows in biggest US city

This new New York Times article reports on more good news about crime rates from the Big Apple.  Here are the encouraging details:

Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Tuesday that a city his opponents once said would grow more dangerous under his watch had, in fact, become even safer.

Robberies, considered the most telling indicator of street crime, are down 14 percent across New York City from last year.  Grand larcenies — including the thefts of Apple devices that officials said drove an overall crime increase two years ago — are also down, by roughly 3 percent.  And after a record­-low 335 homicides in 2013, the city has seen 290 killings in the first 11 months of this year, a number unheard-­of two decades ago.

“When I came into this job, people always talked about last year — last year was an amazing year in this city in terms of bringing down crime,” Mr. de Blasio said.  “We saw what was possible.  The city’s crime rate continues to go down.”

Even shootings, which had increased by more than 10 percent earlier this year, have receded amid a push by the Police Department to stamp out troublesome pockets of gun violence.  There were just over 1,000 shootings in the first 11 months of this year, about a 4 percent increase over last year....

For Mr. de Blasio and his police commissioner, William J. Bratton, the numbers provided a kind of cushion for the criminal justice and policing reforms that both men are putting into place.

Officers will this week begin a pilot program of wearing body cameras in three police commands, Mr. Bratton said on Tuesday, and a wholesale retraining of the department’s patrol force is also starting.  A new marijuana policy aimed at reducing low­-level arrests, which was announced in November, has already resulted in a 61.2 percent decline in arrests in its first two full weeks....

The decline in the city’s crime rate, while deeper in many categories than other cities, mirrors a nationwide downward trend from heights of violent crime in the 1990s.  How much any one mayor or one police commissioner has control over crime has remained a subject of debate.  Indeed, Mr. de Blasio pointed to 20 years of “momentum” that he inherited, referring to an “arc of continuous progress across different mayors, different commissioners.”  He expressed pride in the performance of the Police Department over the first 11 months of this year, and declined to describe the continued decline as vindication of his reform-­minded policies.  Others were more ready to do so.

“Bravo!” wrote Joseph J. Lhota on Twitter, who as the Republican candidate for mayor last year ran ads predicting a return to the crime-­plagued streets of the early 1990s if Mr. de Blasio were elected.

With a month still to go before the end of the year, the favorable crime numbers appeared to render a verdict on at least one question: Would a vast decline in the number of recorded stop­-and-­frisk encounters create an opening for violence to return?  So far, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton said, the answer has been no Mr. Bratton said that by the end of the year there would be fewer than 50,000 such stops, down from a high of over 685,000 in 2011.  That sharp decline, like crime over all, began well before Mr. de Blasio took office and has continued.

As the title of this post highlights, this great news on crime rates is also great news for those eager to encourage continued reform of state and federal criminal justice policies and practices. In addition to recent stop-and-frisk and marijuana policing reforms, New York five years ago reformed its draconian Rockefeller drug laws and the state's prison population has also been reduced significantly in recent years. And, of course, if many recent federal sentencing reforms were to have any significant impact on crime rates, we reasonably should expect New York City to be a window on this national story.

Critically, I am not trying to assert or even suggest that recent crime reductions are the result of all the criminal justice reforms of recent years. But I do mean to highlight and stress that it seems freedom has been significantly increased in the Big Apple without any apparent harm to public safety (and despite lots of folks claiming that criminal justice reforms would surely result in more crime). To paraphrase Old Blue Eyes, not only should everyone start spreading this news, but we should conclude that if we can make criminal justice reform work there, we can make it work just about everywhere.