New York is ‘safest city’ as murders fall to record low
New York City
New York City, despite a sharp economic downturn, is set to end the year with the lowest number of murders since record-keeping began almost half a century ago.
Figures up to December 27 show that the city had recorded 461 murders — a fraction of the peak of 2,245 in 1990 at the height of a crack-fuelled crime surge.
The relatively slow pace of murders suggests that New York will smash its previous annual low of 496 in 2007, which was the first time that the murder rate had dipped below 500 since records started in 1963.
At the height of the decades-long crime surge that began in the 1960s New York recorded more than six murders a day.
This year there were two stretches of almost a week when the city recorded none at all.
The 2,751 deaths in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre are not counted in the crime figures.
Serious crime, such as murder, rape, assault, burglary, robbery and larceny, fell in the city for the 19th consecutive year despite predictions that the recession would force people to turn to crime.
“The conventional wisdom is that when the economy suffers, crime goes up, but we’ve never accepted that premise,” Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, said in a speech prepared for the graduation of 250 police cadets.
Mr Bloomberg boasted that New York was the “safest big city in the nation”.
The FBI crime figures showed that New York had the lowest crime rate of the 25 biggest US cities, with 1,151 crimes per 100,000 people.
San Antonio in Texas was the worst with 2,538 crimes recorded per 100,000.
Experts attribute the crime reductions in New York to good policing, even though the New York Police Department had shrunk by 6,000 officers to 34,000 since its peak in 2001.
The police department aggressively tries to remove illegal guns from the streets by questioning and frisking suspects.
The police also flood high-crime areas with officers in a tactic known as Operation Impact.
Mr Bloomberg, who is beginning his third term in office, hopes to cut the murder rate further by restricting the supply of guns from out-of-state shops.
Earlier this month a street vendor was shot dead in front of tourists in Times Square when he began firing an automatic pistol at police. The man had bought the weapon from a gun shop in Virginia.
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