Excellent NYTimes Op-Ed about Crime in cities - The Left Keeps Getting It Wrong On Crime

LINK

Edited to fit the post - full op-ed linked above

After spikes in homicides and other offenses, which sparked fears of a return to the bloody New York of the 1990s, major crime in New York City has headed toward historic lows. In New York and throughout the country, that rise in crime since 2020 was preceded by progressive policy experiments that kept criminals and suspects out of prison and jail, reduced the number of and activity by police officers, treated fewer offenses as crimes and destroyed public trust in the left.

But progressives in New York and elsewhere are still trying to eliminate tools that have made the police more effective. The gang database — a running record of individuals suspected of gang membership based on intelligence gathered by officers and detectives — is central to these efforts. Nevertheless, Democratic lawmakers and progressive activists are pushing to abolish gang databases, as progressives in cities across the country have been trying to do for years. How can a city possibly tackle gang violence without any means of tracking who the gang members are? Progressive critics of the databases don’t say.


Perhaps the most resonant objection to gang databases is that they largely include Black and Hispanic men. In New York City, for example, critics note that while about 60 percent of New Yorkers are Black, Hispanic or mixed race, about 99 percent of those in the database are Black or Hispanic. They claim that is evidence of racism.

But that is, sadly, roughly in line with the share of the city’s known shooting victims and suspects who are Black or Hispanic. Between 2019 and 2023, an annual average of 95.8 percent of known shooting victims were Black and Hispanic, as were an annual average of 96.5 percent of known shooting suspects. And about half of New York City’s violence is committed on just 3.7 percent of the city’s street segments.

If the police are going to be responsive to the problem of criminal violence, their efforts are going to have to reflect the geographic and demographic concentration of that problem. So policing that produces racial disparities in enforcement is a matter not of racism but of demographics. This also means that the benefits achieved by gang sweeps are disproportionately concentrated in the neighborhoods where police resources are being disproportionately deployed, which are predominantly Black and Hispanic.