Crime and Gratitude in New York

By THE NYTimes EDITORIAL BOARD

Kiersten Essenpreis

The crime rate keeps falling in New York City, and falling. The trend has held for many years, and not even 2016 — so terrible in so many other ways — broke the pattern. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner James O’Neill hit the high points at a news conference on Wednesday: The year ended with fewer than 1,000 shootings, a record low. There were fewer murders (335) than in 2015 (352), fewer rapes, fewer burglaries, fewer robberies. Over all, 101,606 major-category crimes were reported in 2016, compared with 105,921 in 2015.

“Just 25 years ago there were over 5,000 shootings in a single year in the city,” Mr. de Blasio said. “Look how far we have all come together.”

Far, indeed. What is striking, too, is how crime has fallen even as policing and criminal justice polices have drastically shifted. Crime fell when New York City officers were logging hundreds of thousands of stop-and-frisk encounters every year, and it fell when the department all but abandoned the unjust policy — there were only about 10,000 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers in all of 2016.

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