Is this city descending into chaos, or are Mayor de Blasio’s critics using small spikes in crime to whip up the public against him?
If you believe the blaring headlines, shootings are climbing, the homeless are taking over, drug use has suddenly escalated, and Times Square is hurtling back to its X-rated past.
Even Curtis Sliwa has returned with his Guardian Angels show.
This is all part of a storyline concocted by powerful people in this town who are bent on turning de Blasio into a one-term mayor.
Their narrative ignores inconvenient facts and basic history.
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In a report released Tuesday, for example, the conservative Manhattan Institute noted that murders were up 11% for the first six months of 2015, compared with last year.
That 11% figure, however, represents only 17 additional homicides — from 145 during the first six months of 2014 to 162 in the same period this year.
Even a single homicide is one too many, but this is hardly a crime wave, especially since de Blasio’s first year in office ended with total murders at a historic low, and given that total felonies continue to drop.
Through Sunday, the number of shootings in the city are down 0.3%. And overall, serious crime is down 4.5%.
Those of us who lived through the 1980s and 1990s in New York remember years when more than 100 people were murdered just in Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct in East New York.
And the current raw crime numbers should be seen in the context of something else — an unprecedented influx of newcomers.
The city’s population now stands at nearly 8.5 million. That’s 150,000 more residents than when de Blasio was elected two years ago — a jump equal to the total population of Paterson, N.J., or Springfield, Mass.
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And don’t forget the tourists.
Last year, we had a record 56.4 million visitors — a whopping 2.1 million more than in 2013.
“Those visitors are not just staying in Manhattan,” Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said. “They’re going into new terrains in the outer boroughs, into high-crime areas they aren’t familiar with.”
You can thank home-sharing sites like Airbnb for that.
“With all those extra people, it’s a huge achievement if you can keep crime numbers steady,” Adams noted.
Adams was an NYPD cop before becoming a politician. He was platoon commander on the overnight shift in both Brooklyn’s 88th and 94th precincts.
“It was definitely the Wild West back then,” he said. “We’re a far cry from that now.”
The fact is, crime has been dropping in this town for a quarter century.
Even under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, though, there were three separate years that murders spiked. In 2006, for instance, there were 596 murders, a jump of 57 (or 11%) over the previous year. Reported rapes increased steadily between 2009 and 2012. But none of this sparked blaring headlines about the city going backward.
As for Sliwa, he’s suddenly angry that 62 crimes were reported in Central Park so far this year. Where was he when 66 were logged over the same period during Bloomberg’s last year in office?
New York’s elite adored Bloomberg. They can’t stand de Blasio, with all his policies aimed at ending the Tale of Two Cities. So they will keep doing all they can to make us us to believe the sky is falling.
