Headlines and Reality

Headlines and Reality  The headlines make the residents believe that crime is high, but according tothe police commissioner this is not the case. See what you think results from crime headlines March 1, 2009 As Hard Times Loom, Will New York’s Streets Get Meaner? By AL BAKER With each crack of gunfire, with each new homicide, the trajectory of public safety in New York City is being measured. Headline: A 15-year-old boy in the Bronx is shot on Monday in a dispute over graffiti.  Headline: A 21-year-old woman is shot dead on Wednesday on a street in East New York, Brooklyn, a neighborhood once known as the “dead zone.”  Headline: A 53-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl are fatally shot on Thursday night inside an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. If a shrinking economy, soaring jobless claims and a troubled financial sector are not angst-producing enough, the threat of increased crime is leading many conversations toward a nagging and persistent question: Will the bad old days of record numbers of murders and ubiquitous street muggings be far behind? “If you’re nervous, some noise can make you jump,” said Dennis C. Smith, a professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, who has studied the New York City Police Department’s strategies to reduce crime. “And I think we are understandably very, very nervous.” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, for his part, said he has heard this all before.He said similar worries were being voiced as he took over in 2002 for a second stint as the city’s top police official: Things were headed in the wrong direction, the economy was devastated after Sept. 11, 2001, and there were predictions that crime would increase. Instead, overall crime has dropped nearly 30 percent in the last seven years, he said, and in 2007 the lowest number of killings was recorded since the city started keeping what it considers reliable records, about four decades ago. “There’s a lot of predictions that crime is going to go up as a result of the economic crisis,” Mr. Kelly said on Friday during a news conference to announce an arrest in the fatal beating of an Ecuadorean immigrant in December.“The fact of the matter is that hasn’t happened,” Mr. Kelly said. “The fact is we’re down 14 percent, and we’re down in every category across the city.” “We’ve met these challenges before,” he added. Criminologists warn that it can be misleading to analyze crime data for short periods of time and say that clusters of murders can occur during periods of overall crime decreases. Still, after the first two months of 2009, Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said that murders in the city are down slightly. As of Feb. 25, there were 55 homicides in the city, Mr. Browne said, compared with 66 in the same period a year go, a 17 percent decrease. Despite a recent surge in violence, crime in East New York, which is part of the 75th Precinct, is mirroring the citywide trend: It is down 14 percent.“It is flat in every category,” Mr. Kelly said. “It is actually flat, as far as homicides are concerned. It is down as far as shootings are concerned.” But crime statistics and people’s feelings about public safety “are not perfectly correlated,” Professor Smith said.“People have had this longtime misconception that crime came down in New York City because the economy improved, and I have been telling people that it is just the reverse — the economy improved after crime went down,” Professor Smith said.  “Hotel occupancy went up after crime went down. Airport arrivals went up after crime went down. Employment went up after crime went down.”Thomas A. Reppetto, a police historian and a retired commander in the Chicago Police Department, said a city becoming less safe because of a sputtering economy was not something that would occur quickly. Even if stores were going out of business and being boarded up, reversing the revitalization of certain neighborhoods, it would not happen “overnight.” A key issue is whether the city, facing a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, would be able to sustain the Police Department’s size or be able to provide money for hiring or overtime costs. Mr. Kelly said he would like to have more officers, and expressed hope that the federal stimulus package would contain grant money for new hires. Mr. Reppetto said he believed crime would continue declining this year. “For 2009, if the police receive some additional things because of federal money, and if they continue to carry out the strategies they have carried out, you will not see a significant rise in crime; indeed, it will probably go down,” he said. “But if there is going to be a prolonged depression, recession, then we have to think about other scenarios.”Mr. Reppetto said predictions about “the fall of the Big Apple” were made in 1990, when homicides hit their peak at 2,245, and, “murder gangs with machine guns” roamed the streets. “I got calls galore,” Mr. Reppetto said. “Is this the end of New York? Is New York finished? The BBC wanted to know what was going on.” In Bedford-Stuyvesant, outside 117 Van Buren Street, where two people were killed late Thursday, residents said it was hard to tell if they were at the threshold of a new era of lawlessness. But they spoke of their anger over crime and those responsible. “The kids around here don’t feel like they have any other choice,” said Renee Taylor, 21, who works as a security guard. “There’s definitely more robberies lately. That’s getting popular now. People will knock right on the door with a gun. You can tell them some sob story about being broke, but they’re just going to get mad at you.”A friend, Jessica Paige, 21, offered a simple theory about why people turn to crime: “It’s a money thing.” Colin Moynihan contributed reporting. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company