Jose writes Daily Heights: “Via a Gothamist post, I came across the crime stats for our lovely precinct, the good ol’ reliable 7-7. While the 2004 crimes were down compared with 1993, the current numbers are freaky. There’s been a 66.6%[5] jump in rapes versus the 3 of 2004 for the last 28 days, and 75% increase in murders. Ahh, the price of cheap rent.”
Gothamist post here: http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2005/07/13/crime_news.php
The 7-7 stats here (Report Covering the Week of 06/27/2005 Through 07/03/2005) [PDF]:
http://nyc.gov/html/nypd/pdf/chfdept/cs077pct.pdf
It’s probably more meaningful to look at the “Year to Date” column… In fact, for the year, rapes are down 50% for 2005 vs 2004 (10 vs 20). On the other hand, there is a more troubling jump in murders — 7 for 2005 vs 4 for 2004.
Yes, but overall, the numbers don’t really support the idea that as gentrification increases crimes decreases. Then again, that concept’s always been bunk. The UES has a lot of rapes.
Maybe in the very long run crime theoretically should decrease as gentrification increases, but the transition years are bad, I bet, with old timers harboring deep resentments, some of which we’ve seen expressed here. Don’t forget that the 77th also covers Crown Heights, some parts of which look like “Escape from New York”, deeply depressed and scary. I also bet alot of crime doesn’t even get reported.
Even if you could in fact empirically demonstrate that gentrification led towards a decrease in crime, would you admit it?
just a thought: rape is a vastly underreported crime, just because the reported number of rapes have increased, it doesn’t mean that the actual number of rapes in the precinct have. just the number that were reported. it’s not a reliable statistic.
i remember looking at rape stats while choosing a college, only to dismay at the number of my acquaintances who did eventually get raped in college, yet magically, the stats never changed.
Yeah, but murders are never underreported. 🙂
>Even if you could in fact empirically demonstrate that >gentrification led towards a decrease in crime,
>would you admit it?
Are you implying that this would be impossible to empirically demonstrate? Wouldn’t it be easy to show a direct correlation between inreasing median income and decreasing crime rate in the 77th precinct?
Dailyheights,
No, I’m implying that the reason most people deny there’s a link is because it’s not pc to draw a link, not b/c of any evidence or lack thereof. People are just afraid to say it.
Empirically, it would take more than just the CompStat report to draw certain conclusions. First, some of the “freaky” numbers are due to small sample sizes and short time frames. Second, I’d guess that crime stats are better analyzed normalized for population growth (crimes/thousand residents). Third, the numbers would have to be analyzed relative to other neighborhoods or the city as a whole. What is nice to see about the report is that overall crime reports have dropped substantially over time.
I love it.
Hey… least we’re not living in East New York.
thank you escap for putting the stats in context and saving me the stat geek speech!
Erm. I think you’re all slightly off the mark. I’ve only glanced over, but you’re looking at the wrong compstat figures.
You can’t compare years when you are halfway through them. And you can’t compare one week’s crime one year with one week’s crime another year. That’s why you end up with such skewey results as 66% increase. You could find the following week that robbery has dropped 75%!
If you want to really compare, I suggest you find the results for the final week of the year and then compare the year on year figures. Or better still, find the annual figures. I’m sure you’ll find that in general over the last ten years serious crime has fallen in the area.
PS Apologies to escap ands daveb (who are both right also) sorry everybody…in a hurry…