Matthew McDermott
Gov. Hochul issued a deceptively worded statement last week touting substantial “reductions” in crime across New York state in 2024.
“Shootings Down 26% to Date,” it bragged. “Lowest Number of Shooting Incidents with Injury Since 2006.” “Gun Violence in New York State is at its lowest point since 2006.”
“Here is the data, despite what you’re hearing from the fear-mongers out there today,” Hochul claimed in a press conference she called to celebrate her news. “Murder and gun crime rates are down lower than they’ve been in 60 years.”
Well, as a proud “truth-monger,” I must correct the governor on her “data.”
First, the numbers the governor cited came from only 28 of the more than 500 police departments in the entire state.
The report she cheered carries on every page the bold-faced notation, “Current data are preliminary and are subject to change” — reminiscent of the federal government’s recent Bureau of Labor Statistics employment revisions and the FBI’s corrected crime data.
Moreover, those 28 police departments cover just 4.3 million, or 22%, of the state’s 20 million people.
Notably, the report Hochul relied on doesn’t cover a single county in New York City, all of which have Democratic district attorneys.
It was obvious that the governor hastily issued this misleadingly worded press release to assist Democratic candidates, who are being hammered on crime and quality-of-life issues, in their races against Republicans for seats in Congress
But the vast majority of the people in the 28 police departments whose stats she cited — 78% — live in counties with Republican district attorneys.
In other words, people living in counties and towns with Republican DAs are doing very well crime-wise, thank you.
Hochul singled out seven police departments in particular for achieving the greatest crime reductions: Nassau County, Suffolk County, Utica, Troy, Niagara Falls, Rochester and Syracuse. Six of those seven work with Republican DAs.
You’d think that after the FBI got caught cooking the books on nationwide crime statistics just weeks before the election, the governor would be more careful.
But no — Hochul had to give New York Democratic candidates their talking points on crime, so she rushed out this slick set of statistics.
Now let’s look at how the 16 million New Yorkers living in the more than 472 police departments not included in the governor’s stats live.
The brutal truth is that felony crime in New York City is up 33%, or more than 45,000 crimes, over 2019 levels year to date.
Yet the governor celebrates a minuscule 2% NYC crime reduction from 2023 to 2024.
Crime in the rest of New York state in 2023, the last full year of statewide crime statistics, is up 15.8% over 2019 levels — more than 26,000 additional crimes.
While violent crime by firearm went down outside the city in 2023, it is still 17.6% higher than it was in 2019, and aggravated assault by firearm is 40.7% higher in 2023 than in 2019.
And as our politicians hold press conferences patting themselves on the back for getting crime down from one year to the next, they’re not mentioning that NYC crime is vastly higher than it was than before they launched their foolish bail and other reforms.
Are we supposed to forget the hundreds of New Yorkers who were murdered during the early years of this decade?
In 2019, the last year of two decades’ worth of incredible crime reduction, 568 people were murdered in New York state.
The next year, murders rose to 841 — and have remained high ever since.
Do we now celebrate that “only” 635 people were murdered — 67 more than in 2019 — last year?
That is good news, but why did literally hundreds of innocent New Yorkers have to die from 2020 to 2022, as progressive politicians patted themselves on the back for “bail reform”?
It’s wrong for Hochul to use the elevated numbers of the early 2020s as the crime benchmark — an effort to have us forget the misguided criminal justice policies that caused these double-digit crime increases in the first place.
No, state crime stats must be compared not with last year, but with 2019, the year before cashless bail, “Raise the Age,” parole reform and many of the other woke Democrat criminal-justice changes took full effect.
Those measures resulted in the largest mass release of incarcerated criminals from state jails in New York’s history — more than 7,000 prisoners charged with burglary, robbery, car theft, assault, drug dealing and just about any misdemeanor.
Hundreds more violent inmates were also released in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Those irresponsible inmate releases generated historic crime increases.
It’s simple: There’s more crime on New York’s streets because there are more criminals on our streets.
And Hochul’s sneaky statistics cannot change the fact that bail reform resulted in the death and victimization of thousands of overwhelmingly minority New Yorkers.
That’s something even our legislators should be able to comprehend.
Jim Quinn was executive district attorney in the Queens District Attorney’s Office, where he served for 42 years.