Crime
NYC is not a killing field
I have a weakness for the New York Post. Their politics are odious, but damn, they’re very skilled practitioners of the tabloid arts. Right now, though, they’re trying to convince New Yorkers—with some success, alas—that we’re in the midst of a horrid crime wave. Just as I was typing that, I got a notification from the Post on my phone reporting that four students were slashed in a fight inside a high school. The paper is tireless in its fearmongering.
In this campaign, they’re assisted by Donald Trump, who bellowed on his Truth Social platform a few months ago that “MURDERS & VIOLENT CRIME HIT UNIMAGINABLE RECORDS!” (caps in original, of course) in the city.
Fact-checking Trump and the Post are thankless tasks, but it seems worth setting the record straight. Crime is not at record levels—nowhere near it.
Let’s look at murders, the best measure to look at according to criminal justice connoisseurs for getting a sense of overall trends. Murder isn’t only the most serious crime around, the stats on homicide are also the most reliable of all, because few murders are missed and other types of crime are subject to reporting and classification errors. Here’s the history in a graph:
Last year, there were 391 murders in the city, down 11% from 2022, 20% from 2021, and 83% from the all-time peak in 1990. So far this year, murders are down 25% from the same period last year. If that rate is sustained through 2024, we’ll be back to the pre-covid lows. There is just no crime wave, but reactionaries like Trump and the Post want you to think so.
Since the city’s population has changed over the years (though not by as much as you might think), it’s worth looking at the murder rate, the number of homicides per 100,000 people. Here’s what that looks like. At just under 5 per 100,000, it’s down by 85% since the 1990 peak. It’s exceeded by cities that Trump and the Post editorialists no doubt imagine are safer, like Miami (11 per 100,000), Dallas (12), and Houston (also 12). Sad to say, NYC’s peak rate of 31 per 100,000.
Our terrible mayor, Eric Adams, could be making these points, but he doesn’t want to—he’d rather blame migrants for our problems. Besides, doing something about important things like the cost of housing or adapting to climate change might annoy the landlord class that runs the city. Better to stoke fears of our neighbors and of refugees.
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Bad Kingdom (1972)
In 1972, the government drew up plans to construct a deportation facility off the coast of Ireland that could house as many as 70 million people - the entire population of the UK, if need be. The intention was to make it an exact replica of the United Kingdom and call it Bad Kingdom. Nobody, it seemed, fulfilled the increasingly stringent criteria of what it meant to be truly British.
Experts estimated that, by 2050, the United Kingdom's only remaining residents would be members of the Cabinet, the Royal family, and bald-headed perpetually enraged men with a poor command of the English language whose idea of patriotism was to attack with deckchairs anyone who so much as spoke with a foreign accent.
In all likelihood, without enough people to maintain a working infrastructure, these UK residents would have to sneak into Bad Kingdom in order to stock up on supplies and to have a shower, although doing so would be illegal and carry a sentence of deportation back to the United Kingdom where they risked being deported to Bad Kingdom, leaving the UK empty.
The Infamous Class 3 School Illustration (1976-1979)
On 10 September, 1976, dozens of children, including every single pupil from class 3, Scarfolk High School, vanished on their way to school. A police operation was launched but no clues were ever found. The children were pronounced dead the following Monday, a mere three days later.
Every year thereafter, the police commissioned their sketch artist to draw, in the style of a school photograph, how the missing children might have looked (albeit with their faces removed) had they not disappeared in mysterious circumstances. This was sent to the bereaved parents of class 3 at an exorbitant cost of £31.25.
In the 1979 class sketch, one parent noticed a small label on one of the faceless figure's clothes that contained a code word only their child could have known.
Under mounting pressure from parents, the police eventually raided their artist's studio and found 347 children in his cellar where many had been held captive for several years. The police immediately seized and confined the children as evidence in a crime investigation, which, after much dithering, ultimately never went to court leaving the families no choice but to pursue a private prosecution against the kidnapper.
As the children had already been pronounced dead and the cost of amending the relevant paperwork was high, they were given away as prizes in the Scarfolk police raffle, which helped pay the legal fees of their sketch artist, who, it turns out, was the son of Scarfolk's police commissioner.