A critic of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is led out of the room by police during a House Judiciary Committee field hearing on violent crime in New York on April 17.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Following former President Donald Trump’s indictment in New York, various Republicans have accused Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of enabling a crime wave in the city. Earlier this week members of the House Judiciary Committee even held a hearing, in Manhattan regarding the city’s crime issue.
Committee chairman Representative Jim Jordan, from Ohio, described New York as “a city that has lost its way … here in Manhattan, the scales of justice are weighed down by politics. For the district attorney justice isn’t blind, it’s about looking for opportunities to advance a political agenda: a radical political agenda.”
The committee heard testimony from survivors and family members of victims of crimes throughout the city. Including Jose Alba, a worker at a store in Harlem who was assaulted by two customers. He killed one of them in self-defense, and was charged with murder. Those charges were eventually dropped, but Alba says the ordeal is far from over. “I am now traumatized from the incident. I am not working because I am terrified for my life that someone in a gang will come after me for revenge,” Alba says.
New Yorkers have mixed reaction about whether crime is a concern
While there is a belief among some Republicans that New York is in the midst of a crime wave, ask New Yorkers how concerned they are about crime, and you’ll get all kinds of different answers. Among them a sense of doom: the city is heading back into the bad old days. But these visions are distinctly at odds with the data. Experts say, crime rates in the city have in fact been decreasing. So what’s up with the difference between perception and reality?
Chris David was born and raised in Brooklyn but currently lives in Queens. He’s 50, and he worries about his daughters: he sees the news about shootings involving young people in parts of New York and thinks “it’s getting worse now than it was in the ’90s.” He blames it on leniency and bail reform.
Just one block down from where he’s walking his dog in his neighborhood, Lucy Nystrom, 28, has a completely different take. She says she feels very safe, although she acknowledges that “there’s definitely issues with mental health in New York City. I think it’s always been a problem here, and I think it’s being handled really poorly.”
At a press conference, Tuesday — the day after the committee hearing, neither Mayor Eric Adams nor New York City Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell acknowledged Representative Jordan’s hearing. Instead, they announced the indictment of a group that was targeting nightclubs, drugging primarily gay men, and robbing them. Two people died of overdoses.
Experts say New York is not experiencing a crime wave
So is it accurate to say New York in the grips of a crime wave?
Some experts say, not at all.
“Putting shooting and homicide crimes into context, we’re a much safer city than we were 30 years ago,” says Assistant Professor Christopher Herrmann, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He’s formerly with the NYPD, and has been studying the city’s crime trends for years. Herrmann says last year, there were 438 murders; there were nearly 2000 a decade ago.
Ahead of the hearing, Herrmann decided to compare New York City Crime rates with rates in Columbus, Ohio, which Congressman Jordan represents. “We see that you’re 4.3 times more likely to be killed in Columbus Ohio than Manhattan. And you see that 7.3 times as many cars per capita are being stolen in Columbus Ohio, than in Manhattan.”
It’s a downward trend that continues for New York. According to NYPD, in March 2023, New York City saw a 26.1% drop in shooting incidents compared to this time last year. And homicides fell by 11.4%
So why are some New Yorkers alarmed? One reason might be that during the pandemic crimes spiked quite significantly. But Herrmann points out that this was not a phenomenon exclusive to New York. Crime soared across the U.S. especially car jackings. There was also a spike in hate crimes — particularly anti-Asian.
The good news, is things have been settling down, and the downwards trend is continuing: crime rates have been dropping precipitously since the 90s in New York. There is one caveat, he says: While there are fewer shootings in the city, an increasing percentage of them, are by and against young people.
But unfortunately, Herrman says, that’s also a nationwide problem.