The Crime Rate Lie

A few days ago, as they do every month, the NYPD held a news conference to crow about their latest murder statistics. The numbers, if you can believe it, had dropped dramatically yet again. Why, the city's on track to have the lowest murder rate since, oh, 1753.

What amazes me is not that the NYPD continues to toss these numbers out there, but that every news outlet in the city takes it at face value, happily reporting, "La la la we're all being friendly to one another." This time around, only Newsday bothered to do a little checking, which revealed that the murder rate in the Bronx was actually up 50 percent over last year.

Nobody seems to remember the 2003 bombshell that crime stats had been dropping (dramatically, of course) since Giuliani's law 'n order administration simply because pressure to get the numbers down had forced precincts to start fudging the numbers across the board. More and more often, "murder" was reclassified as "manslaughter," and felonious assaults became simple assaults-or, better still, "menacing." A lot of people were still dying violently at the hands of someone else, but so long as it's considered merely "manslaughter," that murder rate'll keep on falling.

Of course the story was ignored at the time, too.

I guess people are just happier to believe the comforting lies, strolling about blissfully with the blinders on.

-Jim Knipfel