Do Black Lives Really Matter? Latest New York City Crime Statistics

This has been the year of mass protests over the killings of unarmed black people by the police. Most of the protests were in explicit reaction to a small number of famous incidents. In March it was the death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville; then in May, George Floyd in Minneapolis; and in June, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. The protests, often accompanied by violence and looting, continued through the summer and into the fall. The ubiquitous slogan was: Black Lives Matter.

Here in New York, both the state legislature and City government have reacted to the Black Lives Matter protests with a series of measures that have included exempting many crimes from bail requirements, and a reduction of about $1 billion (16%) in the budget of the City Police Department. These are the principal steps that supposedly will demonstrate that yes, black lives do, in fact, matter.

In recent days and weeks the NYPD has released some data as to violent crime in the City as we near the end of 2020. How’s it going? The answer is, it’s an unmitigated disaster, particularly for black and Hispanic crime victims.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Ben Chapman has a piece with the headline “New York City’s Shooting Surge Hits Black and Hispanic Communities Hardest.” (probably behind pay wall). Chapman reports that, according to the latest data from the NYPD through December 20, the number of shooting incidents in New York City has more than doubled in just the last year, comparing 2020 to 2019:

Between Jan. 1 and Dec. 20, the city recorded 1,824 shooting victims, up nearly 104% from 896 during the same period a year earlier, according to NYPD data.  The number of shootings increased to 1,493 for the year so far, compared with 754 for the same time in 2019, the data showed.

Chapman checks in with the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice to see how many of the victims were black or Hispanic. The answer is, almost all of them:

An analysis of NYPD data by that office [Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice] showed that 1,440 of 1,495 shooting victims between Jan. 1 to Oct. 1, or 96%, were either Black or Hispanic. During that period, 29 shooting victims were white.

The shootings turn out to be very heavily concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods that are populated almost entirely by blacks and Hispanics:

Eight low-income neighborhoods, including six in Brooklyn and two in the Bronx, have the highest number of shootings of any neighborhoods in the city, according to the analysis. Gun violence has been a persistent and longstanding problem in those neighborhoods, which include the Brownsville and East New York sections of Brooklyn and parts of the South Bronx.

Chapman doesn’t give statistics for homicides in this piece, but such data for New York City through December 20 can be found here. The number of murders through December 20 for this year is 437, which represents an increase of 39.2% over the 314 at this point last year, and an increase of more than 50% over the low of 290 in 2017.

According to Chapman’s piece, citing the analysis of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, “the racial breakdown of shooting victims follows patterns in previous years.” That would mean that the increase of nearly 1000 shooting victims over last year includes something like 950 blacks and Hispanics; and the increase of 123 murder victims over last year includes about 118 blacks and Hispanics. Considering that New York City contains less than 3% of the nation’s population, these are rather startlingly large numbers.

Chapman’s piece is securely buried on page A10A of today’s print edition, and in a “Greater New York” section that is only distributed regionally. Hey, the news of nearly 2000 black and Hispanic shooting victims, and about 400 black and Hispanic murder victims, all killed in our local area this year, is not nearly so important as the death of one black man in Minneapolis. That one death occupied the front pages for weeks on end.

What is the reaction of the de Blasio administration to this ongoing catastrophe? Chapman goes to one Jessica Mofield, identified as “executive director of New York City’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence.” In other words, this is the person whose specific responsibility was to prevent the catastrophe that has occurred. Here is her reaction:

[Ms. Mofield] said a range of factors related to poverty and racism have made poor and minority neighborhoods particularly vulnerable to gun violence during the coronavirus pandemic. . . . Ms. Mofield said access to health care, education and jobs should be provided in low-income communities as a preventive measure to stop gun violence.

Yes, it’s racism! Undoubtedly, your racism. And her proposed remedy is that somebody should pour more money into the New York City schools, the ones that already spend about triple national norms per student to achieve inferior educational results. In any event, rest assured that neither Mofield, nor de Blasio, nor anyone else associated with his administration, will accept any accountability for the situation.

I should point out that even if the number of homicides in New York reaches 450 this year, that will represent a rate of about 5 per hundred thousand population, compared to rates in the range of 25 to 40 per hundred thousand for cities like Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and Baltimore. We are still far, far safer than those places. Still, what is currently happening here represents a senseless squandering of the heroic crime reduction efforts in New York going back to the mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani that began in 1994, when there were over 2000 murders per year (about 25 per hundred thousand).

The increase in shootings and murders is a tragedy focused on the black and Hispanic communities. It certainly looks like black lives do not matter to Mayor de Blasio and his progressive allies.