Readers here frequently express some combination of amazement or sympathy to me about my living in Manhattan. The news is filled with reports of spiking crime in our major cities, most especially in New York. Am I not in constant danger? How do I dare to go outside, particularly at night?
It is true that there has been some substantial increase in crime in my area (Greenwich Village), particularly in shoplifting. This increase has followed some recent criminal justice “reforms,” notably limitations on the use of bail requirements to hold accused criminals pending trial. However, the rates of serious crimes, and particularly violent crimes, remain very low in my area, and indeed in most of this city and most other cities.
What rural and suburban readers may be missing is an understanding of the extent to which serious and violent crime is concentrated in a handful of quite small areas. It is understandable that many people fail to appreciate this phenomenon, because it is difficult to find good information on the subject. The press almost completely misses the issue, when not intentionally burying it. The mainstream sources will not report on the concentration of violent crime in a few areas because they think (correctly) that accurate reporting on this subject will reflect badly on minority communities; and the conservative sources are afraid to appear racist, and are mostly happy to report city-wide crime statistics as sufficiently demonstrating the disaster of governance by progressive Democrats.
So to get detailed information on this subject, you need to go to certain specialized sources that have done the digging. A recent significant contribution has come from Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute, whose book “Criminal (In)justice” came out in mid-2022. I will admit to not having yet read the book. However, there is a lengthy review of it by Joseph Bessette in the current edition of the Claremont Review of Books. Also, Mangual gave an interview in a podcast for the Independent Women’s Forum on April 5, where he goes into detail on some of his main findings. I’ll focus on the transcript of Mangual’s IWF podcast, which is not behind paywall.
Here is a key summary quote:
[C]rime is a very hyper concentrated phenomenon that affects very, very small slices of America in very, very big ways, and that affects a very small subset of the population living in those slices of America in a very big way.
The concentration phenomenon can be very clearly seen in some statistics from New York:
[W]hat we found was that about three and a half percent of street segments were responsible for about 50% of all the violent crime in New York City. About 1% of the street segments were responsible for 25% of all the violent crime and some really high number, I think it was almost 40% of street segments didn’t see any crime in a given year.
Here’s how that plays out in terms of the victims of the serious crimes:
[I]n New York City, . . . every single year for which we have data, which goes back to 2008, a minimum of 95% of all shooting victims in the city are either Black or Latino. Almost all of them are men, . . . . Black and Latino men do not constitute anywhere near 95% of New York City’s population.
In fact, blacks and Hispanics together constitute about 52% of New York City’s population; so black and Hispanic males constitute about 26%, and grown black and Hispanic men (16 and up) only about 20%. Men over 40 are also a tiny percentage of the victims. So really, close to 95% of the murder victims come from the 10% or so of the population who are black and Hispanic adult men 40 and below.
Here are some more data on crime concentration by geographic location, this time from Chicago:
[I]n 2019, the United States had a homicide rate collectively of about five per 100,000. Chicago that year . . . was close to about 18 per 100,000. If you look at just the 10 most dangerous neighborhoods in that city, it was over 60 per 100,000. If you look at the most dangerous neighborhood in that city, which was West Garfield Park in 2019, their homicide rate was 131 per 100,000. If you compare that to the 28 safest neighborhoods in the city of Chicago that year, their collective homicide rate was less than two per 100,000 for some of those neighborhoods or for a good chunk of those neighborhoods, the homicide rate was zero per 100,000.
Chicago had 630 homicides in 2022, for a rate of about 24 per 100,000. I think you can be sure that most to all of the neighborhoods that had zero murders in 2019 still had zero murders on 2022. Meanwhile, if West Garfield Park had an overall murder rate of 131 per 100,000, and almost all of the victims were from the one-eighth of the population that are young adult men, then the murder rate among young adult men would be over 1000 per 100,000 — more than 1% per year. Over a ten year period, that would give a young man in that neighborhood around a 10% chance of getting murdered.
When you look at these detailed data, it is very hard to avoid the conclusion that there should be a heavy concentration of law enforcement resources in the neighborhoods where the violent crime is concentrated, specifically focused on stopping the carnage.
However, I should note that Bessette’s piece in the Claremont Review also includes a review of another book titled “What’s Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” by Bill Keller. Keller is the former executive editor-in-chief of the New York Times, and now working at something called the Marshall Project. On his examination of the current state of our criminal justice system, Keller reaches more or less the opposite conclusions from myself and Mangual. A few quoted by Bessette:
“Decriminalize such minor crimes as ‘low-level drug offenses’; divert some criminals to ‘mental health and addiction programs, or probation or community service’; . . . ‘raise the age at which accused youngsters are subject to adult punishment’ . . . .”
I guess that Keller has been reading the crime coverage of his old newspaper, which makes a point of hiding from the readers everything important about what is happening.
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