By Shaila K. Dewan, The New York Times
Murders in New York City have dropped, again. So low has the number dipped - to 566 so far this year from a high of 2,245 in 1990 - that even Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has begun to gently lower the public’s expectations, warning of a core number of homicides resistant to even New York’s gargantuan police force.
Low crime rates are more often the stuff of proud news conferences than of intense scrutiny. Yet as street-corner slayings and drug turf drive-bys have melted away, police officials are collecting more data than ever on the remaining few hundred murders, tracking motives, locations, and even the national origin of victims and killers.
A huge endeavor, the new database provides insight into the question of how much lower, in a city of eight million people, the body count can go. It also offers a picture of how the nature of murder in New York City - a post-crack, post-crackdown New York City - has changed, and how anti-violence strategies must change with it.
Some things have not changed: disputes are the most common type of homicide, followed by drug-related slayings. But based on a review of data drawn from multiple agencies, including the Police Department, the Health Department, the Administration for Children’s Services and the State Department of Criminal Justice, much has shifted since 1991.
While guns still top the list of murder weapons, there are proportionally fewer gun deaths and far fewer drug-related ones. Street murders are down. Innocent bystanders, once the subject of so many screaming headlines, no longer need Kevlar.
But the most stubborn types of homicide - child abuse, intimate-partner killings and other violence in the home - have increased as a percentage of the total. Gang crimes have given way to rivalries between housing projects. Cocaine and crack dealers have retreated, but violence related to the marijuana trade has persisted and, some experts say, risen, because the market has grown and penalties are lax.
New Yorkers are far less likely to be killed by a stranger or casual acquaintance now than 15 years ago. If you are a foreign-born man, you are also less likely to be a victim, but the percentage of female victims who are foreign-born has gone up markedly. The proportion of victims who are black has increased, with a corresponding decrease in the proportion of Hispanics, while the racial breakdown of perpetrators has stayed roughly the same. Killers are slightly older, with the number of teenage suspects falling and the number aged 30 to 34 rising.
The real challenge is the fewer the deaths, the harder it is to reduce those that remain. New York’s homicide rate, 6.9 for every 100,000 people, is already less than that of many far smaller American cities. But some criminologists point to foreign cities like London, with a rate of 2.4, or Amsterdam, at 4.0, as evidence that sizable reductions are possible.
“How low can it go?” said Mr. Kelly, who initiated the database project. “Who knows? Certainly it’s our goal, our public policy position, to do everything we can to continue to suppress it. And we’re getting more information agencywide that is going to help us do that.”
Experts have long debated the causes of New York’s startling reduction in crime. While some have argued that socioeconomic forces and shifting demographics - immigrants, for example, are on average less likely to commit crimes - have done most of the work, the police fiercely defend the role of law enforcement strategies like a greater street presence in trouble spots and a focused effort on taking guns off the streets.
But now that the steepest drops in the body count are past, experts agree on one thing: Saving lives now depends on small-bore interventions and ever-greater attention to detail, whether that means handing out tougher sentences for gun possession, meeting with the Mexican consul general to learn more about inroads by gangs who speak the indigenous Mexican language Mixtec, finding jobs for parolees or giving domestic violence victims pendants that let them immediately summon the police.