New York Gov. Kathy Hochul claims crime is down substantially across the state this year, but New York Post columnist Jim Quinn, a former executive district attorney in Queens, isn’t convinced.
In a recent press release and news conference, Hochul bragged that shootings are down 26% “to date”, and that “murder and gun crime rates are down lower than they’ve been in 60 years.” But as Quinn notes, those statistics are derived from just 28 of the more than 500 police departments in New York, and only cover about 22% of the state’s population.
Notably, the report Hochul relied on doesn’t cover a single county in New York City, all of which have Democratic district attorneys.
It was obvious that the governor hastily issued this misleadingly worded press release to assist Democratic candidates, who are being hammered on crime and quality-of-life issues, in their races against Republicans for seats in Congress
But the vast majority of the people in the 28 police departments whose stats she cited — 78% — live in counties with Republican district attorneys.
In other words, people living in counties and towns with Republican DAs are doing very well crime-wise, thank you.
So what’s going on in those Democratic strongholds in New York? Are they seeing a similar decline in violent crime?
Not exactly.
The brutal truth is that felony crime in New York City is up 33%, or more than 45,000 crimes, over 2019 levels year to date.
Yet the governor celebrates a minuscule 2% NYC crime reduction from 2023 to 2024.
Crime in the rest of New York state in 2023, the last full year of statewide crime statistics, is up 15.8% over 2019 levels — more than 26,000 additional crimes.
While violent crime by firearm went down outside the city in 2023, it is still 17.6% higher than it was in 2019, and aggravated assault by firearm is 40.7% higher in 2023 than in 2019.
Quinn argues that it’s misleading for Hochul to compare this year’s crime rate to the highs seen during the COVID pandemic. Instead, he says it’s more reasonable to compare 2024 crime stats to 2019’s; the last year before the pandemic put a halt to court cases, led to a pullback in policing, and turned thousands of convicted and suspected criminals onto the streets rather than keep them locked up and risk a COVID outbreak behind bars.
2019 was also before the “defund the police” movement swept across Democratic strongholds throughout the U.S., and it was before New York embarked on its criminal justice reforms like imposing cashless bail and raising the age to charge juveniles as adults.
Those measures resulted in the largest mass release of incarcerated criminals from state jails in New York’s history — more than 7,000 prisoners charged with burglary, robbery, car theft, assault, drug dealing and just about any misdemeanor
Hundreds more violent inmates were also released in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Those irresponsible inmate releases generated historic crime increases.
It’s simple: There’s more crime on New York’s streets because there are more criminals on our streets.
Even if we want to just compare this year’s homicide rate to last year’s, Hochul’s data is so woefully incomplete that it doesn’t tell us much. And as we’ve seen with the FBI’s recent revisions to the 2022 crime stats, it’s entirely possible that when New York updates its own crime stats the pretty picture that Hochul has painted will be replaced with more ugly truth.
It’s also worth noting that the reported declines in homicides in cities like New York and Rochester pale in comparison to steeper reductions in cities located in states that don’t have nearly as many restrictions on lawful gun owners. Accordidng to NYPD crime stats, murders in the Big Apple are down 11.5% this year compared to 2023. Buffalo, NY has reported a 2.9% decrease through September 30, Rochester a 12.9% decline, and Syracuse an 11.8% increase as of September 24th.
Compare those figures to the 13.5% decline in homicides reported in Houston this year, the 25.4% decrease in San Antonio, or the 27.3% drop in murders recorded in Dallas, Texas, and it’s easy to see that New York’s restrictive gun control laws aren’t doing much to actually keep New Yorkers safe. They’re much more effective at stopping responsible citizens from being able to protect themselves from the violent criminals that New York Democrats have returned to the streets than preventing those offenders from committing new crimes.
