NYC Crime Stats are Bullshit

It’s official, the famously successful New York City crusade against major crime is all made up.

The Village Voice has a piece this week on an internal NYPD report never made public, which confirms what Bloomberg and Kelly have been denying for several years—that the department systematically cooks the books to show that the rates of big crimes like murder, rape, armed robbery, etc., are going down. This is done by throwing up endless obstacles to people trying to report these crimes, downgrading them to lesser offenses and/or simply losing the paperwork.

Simultaneously (and not incidentally), police officers are also pressured and ultimately forced to increase their notorious ‘stop-and-frisk’ temporary arrests, now running at 684,000 per year, overwhelmingly directed against blacks and Hispanics. This is supposed to show that the department is actively engaged in crime prevention via police-state surveillance of non-white males, a strategy which enjoys the unspoken support of the city’s influential white minority. Young black or Latino men in New York now expect to be pulled over and patted down by cops as a routine part of their lives.

And take a moment to read up on the department’s creepy, East German-style campaign against Adrian Schoolcraft, the police officer who tried to report this statistical manipulation to his superiors. He was subjected to harassment at work to shut him up until finally being seized in a nocturnal raid on his home and confined to a locked psychiatric unit. Luckily, he was smart enough to tape record this event along with his precinct captain’s daily orders to meet arrest quotas—which the department continues to deny exist.

The Voice ran a five-part series on this scandal that ever-so-liberal Mayor Bloomberg helps to cover up. Meanwhile, the current mayor and his principal deputy, Christine Quinn, continue to defend the department’s racist campaign against the city’s Muslim population, now the target of permanent, ethnic snooping. Quinn will parade herself as a progressive in next year’s mayoral race, featuring her marriage to a female partner. We will be expected to cheer the fact that she’s a nice lesbian while ignoring her complicity with these criminal activities by the Great Liberal City’s cops.

I also note in passing that my cycling club, Transportation Alternatives, has a depressing article in this month’s Reclaim magazine about the NYPD’s permanent refusal to pursue traffic-related crimes, including those that cripple or kill cyclists and pedestrians. There are four hair-raising tales of fatal bike accidents, all of which the department failed to investigate properly, mishandled or destroyed evidence, lied about and eventually laughed off as unimportant.

And finally, the NY Fire Department was told this week that it would have to pay $128 million to black applicants who have been systematically excluded from the city’s 95 percent white force. FDNY will also have to hire 300 new black firefighters in the ongoing, 40-year saga of resistance to desegregation. There is as yet no word whether the white FD hierarchy will make a final massive-resistance to the court orders by standing in the firehouse doorways.