Mayor Trumpets his "Innovative" Policing Strategies, while Index Crime and Hate Crimes Continue to Rise

By Yehudit Garmaise

In what was Mayor Bill de Blasio’s last update, after eight years, on his efforts to create public safety in New York City, he said his innovations of Precision Policing and Neighborhood Policing not only worked, but “will be built upon for years to come.”

“We started the administration [in 2014] with ending the broken and abusive strategy of Stop and Frisk, as it was previously practiced,” the mayor said. “We ended that, and then initiated a new era of policing: with more connection between police and community, more common bond between police and community, and we see fewer arrests and fewer incarcerations.

Statistically, compared to November 2020, the numbers of murders and burglaries in New York City went down, by 17% and 6%, respectively, however, robberies, felony assaults, and crimes of grand larceny were up, as the overall index crime in New York City increased by 21.3% in November 2021, compared with November 2020, the NYPD reported.

Perhaps most disturbingly, since November 2020, in New York City, hate crimes have spiked from 251 to 494 in November 2021.

While the number of hate crimes perpetrated against Jews is consistently the highest, that number increased from 121 in November 2020 to 179, last month. Hate crimes perpetrated against Asians were the next largest category: showing a huge jump from 20 hate crimes in November 2020 to 128 last month. 

The mayor reported that since 2014 when he came into office, crime in New York City has decreased by 11%. 

Before the pandemic, which the mayor called “the greatest social disruption in the history of this country,” crime was down by 30%.

“How did it happen?” the mayor asked. “Precision Policing, which is the focus on the small number of people who drive the violent crime.”

“In a city of well over 8 million people,” former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton told Mayor de Blasio early on in his administration, “there are only a few thousand who drive most of the violence.”

“The incessant focus on those people has made a huge, huge impact: The gang takedowns, taking shooters and violent people off the streets. The incredible work of the gun suppression division.

“Gun arrests are the highest they have been in many, many years.”

“A frighteningly small number of people in the city cause an outsized number of the problems of the city,” said Richard Warren, who is the president of the Citizens Crime Commission, “and that is what we call 'the 80/20 rule,' which is a concept in economics that says that 80% of all actions are caused by 20% of all actors.

“What the NYPD has understood is that by focusing on those individuals, you can accomplish great things to reduce crime, while having a much lighter touch, in which you don’t need to arrest a lot of people: you need to arrest the right people.”

In particular, police are focusing on a 7% increase in crime in the New York City Housing Authority, where NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said shootings are down, however, domestic violence and felony assaults have increased.

As is the case throughout the country, another crime on the rise in New York City is shoplifting, which Shea attributed to decarceration: or governmental policies that aim to reduce the number of people imprisoned, as former Gov. Andrew Cuomo did several times throughout the pandemic.

Shea says, "there's a mentality of decarceration regarding these quote-unquote low-level crimes, but when you don't have consequences for the low-level crimes, it grows and grows."

In addition to a lack of enforcement, the lack of consequences that result from the city’s court system that has not been functioning for two years are reasons Shea gave for continued shoplifting, which he said “is probably one of the easiest crimes to stop.

“The problem is that when they’re arrested, we’re literally letting them go.”

Shea, who is retiring at the end of the month, said, “When we look at the crime statistics for the month of November, what we are seeing is recidivism,” which is the tendency of convicted criminals to re-offend.

Of the perpetrators who are arrested for shootings, Commissioner Shea said, almost 30% already have open felony cases.

Another challenge for the next administration, Shea pointed out is that of the perpetrators who are under 18 who are arrested in New York City, 10%, which is an increased number, possess firearms.

“While we are seeing a lot of good news, we have a lot of work to do, and I am 100% confident in the NYPD,” Shea said. “We continue to be the safest big city in America.”