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Last Monday, Venezuelan migrant Sandra Serrano was shot and killed outside the Randall’s Island migrant shelter, caught in the crossfire in what police think was a retaliatory shooting for a robbery.
Serrano’s murder was the second killing at the 3,000-bed shelter, and at least the eighth migrant-related killing this year.
If Mayor Adams doesn’t want such headlines to govern New Yorkers’ perceptions of migrant crime, City Hall needs to provide hard data.
Serrano’s killing marked four murders in July in which migrants were perpetrators or victims — or both.
Mid-month, two men living in a Brooklyn migrant shelter were shot and killed outside it, likely the victims of a Venezuelan gang hit.
The same night, another Venezuelan migrant died violently in a nearby park — and the alleged shooter in this killing wasn’t a migrant, but a parks worker with whom he had fought, highlighting migrants’ vulnerability, as well.
In June, a migrant fatally shot two Bronx residents after they objected to his squatting in their apartment building. In January, a dispute between migrants, also at Randall’s Island, left one man dead.
Non-fatal crimes include the June rape of a Queens girl, the June shooting of two police officers (also in Queens), the February shooting of a tourist during a Times Square shoplifting attempt, multiple armed robberies and petty theft that often goes unreported.
Do these anecdotes add up to a higher or a lower rate of crime, compared with the Gotham average?
There is no way to know.
Adams says migrant gang members are “extremely dangerous,” but the NYPD doesn’t report crime by immigration status.
Absent data, concern that migrants are pushing up the city’s crime rate is met with progressive bromides.
Historically, immigrant crime rates are lower than the national average, experts tell us.
New York absorbed half a million unauthorized immigrants between the early 1980s and 2019, and for three of those decades, crime and disorder fell. Local felony crime is flat since 2022, when the current wave of migrants began arriving.
But Biden-era migration is different.
There are the numbers: 200,000 people have arrived in barely two years, including 65,000 currently in city shelters.
Then there is the economy: Neither New York’s legal jobs nor its non-migrant population are growing quickly, as both did between the 1980s and 2019 — so migrants are competing with each other and driving down wages in the city’s underground economy.
Then, there’s the deteriorated environment of public disorder.
It doesn’t take more than a few days in post-2020 New York City to observe that anything goes: Young migrant men can blast their music outside the Row Hotel in Times Square at all hours or hire a trafficked prostitute on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.
This environment of lawlessness is attractive to Venezuelan gang members. The NYPD suspects that the perpetrators of several recent crimes, including the Queens cop shooting, were members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.
Finally, flat-ish crime numbers are no reassurance. Yes, in 2024 (through July), felony crime and petit larceny are 2% below last year’s levels.
But crime remains significantly above 2019 levels: felony crime is 35% higher, and petit larceny, 27%.
Even as murder falls to the pre-COVID normal nationwide, it remains elevated here.
A disorganized local government trying to enforce laws in an environment of greater leniency dictated by state-level reforms is partly to blame — but only an ideologue would discount any potential migrant role.
We wouldn’t have to speculate if the Adams administration would give us data.
The mayor isn’t entirely hamstrung by the City Council’s sanctuary-city policies.
Yes, the city prohibits most cooperation with federal immigration officials. But police can ask a suspect’s immigration status when investigating a crime beyond being illegally in the country.
They can also inquire whether a suspect lives, or has recently lived, in a migrant shelter. The NYPD could report such data in the aggregate, not with individuals’ names.
Migrant crime may be higher than average — or lower.
But a lack of information can create disinformation.
Indeed, a UK judge allowed the press this week to report the name and background of the underaged suspect accused of slaying three girls in a Merseyside knife attack, to stop the riots that broke out amid false claims that the killer was a recent asylum seeker.
Good policy is based on data and facts, not on preconceived notions — whether pro-migrant or otherwise.
Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Updated and adapted from City Journal.