The State of Crime in the City

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. How much crime is there in New York City, really? The policy journal Vital City has a new special issue with a very deep dive into the actual numbers of different kinds of crime from before the pandemic until now. Vital City's founder, Elizabeth Glazer joins us now. She was previously director of the New York City Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice under Mayor de Blasio.

Some of the trends may surprise you as we look at these numbers, and hopefully, they'll suggest the best ways to reduce crime and hopefully without going to overly punitive mass incarceration policies, if both those things can be accomplished at the same time. Liz, thanks for this research and for sharing it with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Elizabeth Glazer: Thanks so much, Brian, for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Starting with a top-line comparison, you have the major crimes; murder, rape, felony assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny, and grand larceny of a motor vehicle. Anything you want to say about the pandemic as an era-defining driver of the major crimes to start out?

Elizabeth Glazer: Very much so. New York City is a very safe city, but compared to the city we were before the pandemic, we're about 30% higher in all those major crimes than we were in 2019. New Yorkers are jittery and there's a reason. Those crimes are coming down that's good, but they're still very much up from before the pandemic. What that rise is masking is a different trend in the violence that people are experiencing on the streets.

It used to be that violence was driven by violence for a reason. You rob somebody for their money or for a phone. Now what's happening is that robberies are going down, but assaults, which is the the push and the shove, the slashing, those are way, way up. In fact, we haven't seen felony and misdemeanor assaults this high since 1998. That's one thing that I think people may be feeling on the streets.

There's a second piece also, which is we always talk about major crimes as we should, murder, robbery, rape, all the things that you mentioned. If you look at all crimes, which include all those minor things that you might think about that happen on the street or the subway, harassment, petty theft misdemeanor assault, which is the punch, those are way up and have been rising for a decade.

There are a lot more of those minor crimes than there are of the really serious big ones. 83,000 harassments last year versus 377 murders. I think that affects the way people feel when they walk down the street, when they ride the subway if that low-level stuff is spiking.

Brian Lehrer: Why, as far as you can tell, as a former mayoral criminal justice director yourself, if we're talking about some major categories of crime, murder, robberies. Robberies are the muggings, basically, right? If you steal something from somebody's home, that's a burglary. If you steal from their person, that's a robbery. We're probably talking about--

Elizabeth Glazer: By force.

Brian Lehrer: By force. What generally gets called muggings. Those are coming down. These other things, the harassment, as you were just describing it, and felony assault are going up. Why this bifurcation?

Elizabeth Glazer: The honest answer is, I don't know. We don't know why crime dropped like crazy in the 1990s, really. I'm not sure why. Here's one thing I would speculate about. This shift from doing a crime for a reason, you want the money, you want the phone, to the more random assault where you push the person off the platform signals that there is something else that's driving crime.

When we look at the subways, for example, and we've just done a very detailed look with Aaron Chalfin, who's a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Paul Reeping, if you look at subways, what's really, really striking is the very, very high percentage of people who are suffering from mental illness who are represented among people being arrested for these offenses.

One speculation is in the same way that we've seen rates of people suffering from mental illness rise since the pandemic, or maybe we're more attuned to it, maybe that's one of the things that's driving the violence in the city.

Brian Lehrer: Give me one more take on this category, felony assaults, which, as other things have been coming down the last few years, your data notes, "Felony assaults increased 5% last year and are up 40% compared to 2019." What's a felony assault? What kinds of actual situations and crimes are those generally?

Elizabeth Glazer: Felony assault in the state of New York is a very, very serious crime. It has to be a life-threatening disfiguring injury. It's not just a bar fight, it's not just a fistfight. It is, you could have died.

Brian Lehrer: I should put out the phone number. Listeners with any questions that you have for Elizabeth Glazer, the founder of the policy journal Vital City, which has now done a deep data dive, and we'll get to different aspects of it as we go, on crime in New York City at the moment in the last year as compared to before the pandemic and even further back from that. Who has a question? 212-433-WNYC or for that matter, a suggestion about what you would like to see done about it at a policy level that isn't being done now. 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692 call or text. Listener writes, "Will you discuss white-collar crime?" Do you in this research?

Elizabeth Glazer: Such a great question. We don't discuss white-collar crime in this. The really big white-collar crimes that I think people think about Sam Bankman-Fried and things like that are done by the feds. We don't. I guess to the extent that white collar crime maybe is sometimes charged as grand larceny. We have a little bit of that. Unfortunately, this really mainly deals with violence and street property crime.

Brian Lehrer: You break out subway crime stats from the overall. How similar or different compared to what you've been presenting so far?

Elizabeth Glazer: We see an even more striking shift in the subways with a big spike in assaults and a big drop in things like robbery. The nature of the violence has changed. I think, again, that's what people are feeling and what makes them feel jittery. According to all the surveys and just the sense that you get in the city is this random motivated by animus violence that's much harder to prevent and much harder to predict than if, for example, you have a robbery crew. Robberies are easier to identify who's doing them. It's usually a repeat crime. It usually has particular areas that the people will focus on. If you have these kinds of random assaults, that's much, much harder.

Brian Lehrer: There's always talk about percentage chance of being a subway crime victim compared to the perceived fear of that. You address that in your journal article about this. How would you compare those two?

Elizabeth Glazer: The latest survey that I think was done by the MTA shows that fewer than half of people are satisfied with the state of safety in the subways. Yet the actual chances of being a victim of crime, if you just do it by rides, is just incredibly small. It's like 1 of 330 million rides are the rates of murder. Yet you have a murderer like the woman who was set on fire at the end of last year.

That reverberates in a way that the stats don't convey, or just being mugged for your money, a grand larceny. It's one out of every more than a million rides. The chances are very, very low, yet they reverberate, particularly within the subway, because you're in such a confined environment, because you just have no idea about what's going to happen next.

Brian Lehrer: It's, and we've talked about this on the show before, a function of the psychology of risk perception. You feel that you have less control when you're a passenger in a subway car than, let's say, if you're driving your own car. yet a listener texts, "Something that's usually missing from crime stats and sense of safety is dangerous and aggressive driving. I think it contributes to the bias about how dangerous the subway is and the resulting increase in spending on police patrols, similar to what the guest is saying about random acts of violence. It's scary how angry so many drivers seem post-pandemic and how many pedestrians have been hit or nearly hit." Do you have crimes? I know sometimes drivers get charged. Do you have that category as part of this report?

Elizabeth Glazer: We don't. It's such a great point because I think it also goes to a broader point, which is one of the things that we have seen since the pandemic is a great unraveling. It expresses itself not just in the higher rates of mental illness, but also, as the person who wrote in noted, much more aggressive driving, much more dangerous and reckless driving, and down to just everyday loosening of norms. People talking on the phone but using the speaker, people talking in movies as if it's their living room. That's not dangerous behavior, but it's as if the norms of behavior and how we recognize other people sharing space with us has shifted.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "In addition to mental illness, is there a pattern of the typical offender? Are they often repeat offenders?" This listener also writes, "Was bail reform a factor where they're being released to offend again?" We know the bail reform law at the state level was in the year before the pandemic. There may be a short window of statistics on that before the pandemic scrambled everything. You tell us.

Elizabeth Glazer: The listener is absolutely right about recidivism, and particularly in the subways, we're seeing a doubling of that from 3% being recidivists to about 6%. On the surface also recidivism seems to be increasing. Whether it's bail reform or not seems actually quite unlikely. Meaning we're seeing the same numbers of people being released. It's not clear that these offenses are concentrating in categories of crimes where bail would have affected whether the person was released or not. I think it's unlikely, but it has been for sure the scapegoat.

Brian Lehrer: To that bail reform law-- Go ahead, Liz. Go ahead.

Elizabeth Glazer: The thing I would note, though, and we go into this a little bit in our report, is it's not just about how many crimes are committed and whether people are arrested or not. Hopefully, we'll go into the other ways of reducing crime as well. When you think about enforcement, simply the arrest is not enough if what you're trying for is a deterrent effect. Yet what we're seeing in New York City, especially since the pandemic, is very high rates of prosecutors declining to prosecute a case.

Police will bring them a case and the prosecutor decides that the evidence isn't strong enough. Then when they do prosecute the case, declining rates of conviction. It's particularly striking because this is a different trend than we're seeing in upstate New York cities whose declination rate is much, much lower and whose conviction rate is much, much higher than ours.

Brian Lehrer: On the bail reform law, Governor Hochul right now, you probably know this, is trying to undo the so-called discovery rules part of that law. She says the fast timeline now required to bring a case to court sounds good on paper in the interest of swift justice and not forcing somebody to linger in jail in limbo like that before their case comes to trial. The effect is also that it's allowing too many cases to be dismissed because prosecutors can't mount their cases fast enough, putting people who are likely to be recidivists back on the street at a higher pace. Do you agree with that take?

Elizabeth Glazer: Yes. I do think there's something to it. It was an important reform to ensure that there's full and speedy production to a defendant of the evidence against that person. What ended up happening though, is I think it was really an unintended consequence that there really was not a good sense of how much would be required to be produced in a very short period of time. Imagine you have a mugging on a subway train and the police go in, they interview everybody who was on the train.

The discovery requires, in a very short period of time, every single witness statement of all those people, all the body-worn cameras films that they have of it. Just an enormous number of things have to be put together and collected in quite a short period of time that I think has made it hard for the DAs. We have seen rising levels of dismissals because they haven't been able to put the evidence together in time.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking to Elizabeth Glazer, who used to be the criminal justice director for Mayor de Blasio. She then went on to found the policy journal Vital City. They have taken a very deep dive into New York City crime statistics in the last year and compared to before the pandemic and even further back than that. 212-433-WNYC, if you want to continue to call and text. Let's take a phone call right now from Lee in Brooklyn. Lee, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Lee: Brian, Hi. Good to chat. I'm really, really glad that this topic is being covered because just this past weekend I was the victim of a very common but extremely traumatizing event where a man on a crowded D train I got on Grand Street in lower Manhattan was riding really close to me. I noticed that he was really encroaching my space. It was such a crowded train and about halfway to the Atlantic Av-Barclays Center stop I noticed that his, you know what, was out.

It was just out there for me to see and notice. I was so shocked and upset. I screamed out as I got off on the stop what was happening. Everyone just looked at me like I had my eyes crossed. I think they thought I was crazy. He got away. I stopped the conductor. I told her as he saw me stop the train and then go to NYPD. He walked away. NYPD told me that next time I should text 911 while on the train.

What are we supposed to do when we're on the train on a 10 or 11-minute subway car between stops where we can't get out, the train is moving so slow and I'm feeling extremely unsafe. What are we supposed to do? Texting 911 is not going to do anything. I feel like the protocol in general, these little crimes that are committed-- This man could be on his way to committing further crimes against women and children. I feel like I was brushed off. When I told NYPD, they laughed a little bit.

I know that it's a common thing, like, oh, well, welcome to New York. It happens all the time to women in the '70s and '80s with the flashers and everything. This is just adding to the-- I don't feel safe on the subway. I'm afraid right now, and I depend on the subway. Now I'm going to Uber everywhere, even though I can't really afford it. I don't want to go back on the subway. What am I supposed to do?

Brian Lehrer: Liz, what is she supposed to do? Or what is government supposed to do about this?

Elizabeth Glazer: First of all, it's the terrible thing, and it's not just a little thing. It's something that affects you and exactly as you said, it's going to affect your behavior and what you decide to do. These aren't little things. The forcible touching piece is really terrible and obviously particularly targets women. What can you do? He was right that texting 911, if you can do it while you're on the train, if you have the service, absolutely is what you should do. The police, it sounds like, are starting to focus in on what are considered smaller crimes. As you note, really have an impact on your life.

Often people who are involved in those kinds of crimes, like forcible touching, it's not like the first time and it's not the last time that they're going to do that. A lot of times they are known probably to police, and it is worth doing the 911 and connecting with the conductor exactly as you did. I think the distressing part is being brushed off. I think that speaks to how are police and how are MTA staff trained to respond when something like this happens. I think that's something that it sounds like Commissioner Tisch is doubling down on. It's crucial. Everybody has to take this seriously.

Brian Lehrer: Lee, I'm sorry that happened to you. We'll see if we can get before the end of the segment to more solutions, at least at the policy level. I'd say we're getting two main threads of text messages, Liz. One thread is very similar to what we just heard from Lee. Here's one, for example, similar experience to Lee. A listener just wrote listening to that caller. "When I told NYPD a man was doing the same thing on the 6 train, they ignored me and laughed as well. What is the point of millions of dollars being spent to have cops laugh at women? I haven't taken the subway in two years." There are more that are coming in like that.

The other thread, and I'll read one text that represents this thread. Listener writes, "Please address the recent announcement about the plan to police many of the typical actions of the unhoused in the subway." Many people are concerned about an excessive police response which they think is going to victimize other people than the people who are writing and calling in about the way they've been victimized. For you, as a former criminal justice director in the de Blasio administration, do you have new thoughts today about how you strike that balance?

Elizabeth Glazer: I do think that the instinct of elected officials and of police when there's an uptick in crime is that that's the one tool that we can use and deploy and make visible. We have things like the thousand National Guard, we have the surge of police on the subways, but it's performative more than anything else. You think about crime concentrates. There are 30 stations that are responsible for 50% of the violent crime.

I think that there are things more than police that can often address whether crime happens or not. Police are one way to deter crime and they're an important way to deter crime, but they need to be surgically deployed. There are a lot of other things that deter crime as well. One very big and I think unused piece of deterring crime, and this is particularly in the subways, is physically what do the stations and the cars look like. Do people feel like it's totally fine to commit a crime on the station because it's dark or because there's, there are no eyes on the platform or eyes on the street? Yes, that's often a lot of what's going on.

We have evidence of the very highest level, certainly above ground, about how physical changes affect people's behavior. Lighting in New York City housing developments is like a random controlled trial very recently reduced serious crime 36%. Not in 10 years, but when you turned on the lights. I think The MTA now has a pretty active effort underway to make the stations less hospitable to people who are going to be committing crimes and encouraging people who are riders, like your listeners so that they feel safe. I think that it's a mix of things.

I think that there's also quite a bit to be said for having outreach for both those who are homeless and those who are suffering from mental illness. Not that those are people who are always committing crimes, but we do see a high concentration of those folks among the violent crimes. Is there a way to get ahead of that and to use some of these outreach teams in a more sustained and coordinated way?

Subway, for example, now has these scout teams, which are enforcement officials and also outreach workers trying to go around and to house the people who are using the subways as a place to live. You think about that program, which has been somewhat successful, and yet it happens between 8:00 and 4:00. It happens during the daytime hours when often the issues are congregating later at night. There are a lot of resources, but are they targeted and coordinated at the right time for the right people and to have an effect?

Brian Lehrer: I want to mention to our caller, Lee, and anybody else wondering the same thing. Lee asked, what am I supposed to do in that a situation? We've got a number of people texting that the main thing to do is to make a scene is to yell, and that that might scare the guy away. We've got three or four texts like that that have come in just in the last few minutes since her phone call. I'll read one.

Listener writes, "I grew up riding the trains in the 1970s, where being groped was a common occurrence. We learned early to make a scene to call attention to the perpetrator and fellow riders would back you up." This listener also comments, "Sadly, today's riders are too busy looking at their phones or too scared to get involved." You want to reinforce that. Maybe the risk of making a scene is that you provoke the person to escalate whatever violence or potential violence they may be contemplating. There are a lot of people texting, now there are even more coming in, that say some version of make a scene, and other riders will back you up.

Elizabeth Glazer: Absolutely. I think it also goes to another point, which is the subway belongs to the riders, and so that a sense of joint action. I think many people who have been on the subways have had this feeling of fellow passengers helping them when in need. That has to be a more broadly felt sentiment. It's a little bit of a vicious circle. That is, if people experience the treatment that Lee describes and that your other listeners have described, the likelihood that they're going to come forward and help or they're going to report decreases.

Somehow that culture has to be turned around. I think riders are willing to help. Riders will make a scene, riders will help. There has to be a systematic training of both enforcement, conductors. Everybody has to be in it together.

Brian Lehrer: In fairness, Lee did say that she yelled if I remember the call correctly, and that was a piece of her story. At least in her case, that did not work, but I did want to mention that that was the response that a number of listeners who were trying to help came out with. Last thing, we have one minute left. Just to one other stat from your research on recent New York City crime that surprised you, that the average age of arrestees is rising. How much so? I think people generally do consider young adulthood to be the big crime-prone years, right?

Elizabeth Glazer: Absolutely. It's actually pretty shocking. It's both in New York City and actually across the nation. it used to be that violence was a young man's crime. You typically saw people in their 20s is when the most violent behavior occurred, and then they age out. What we're seeing in New York City is now that that age is rising to 30 and above. Why that is whether it's desistance among younger people or whether older people are more distressed, I don't know. It's a big puzzle that's reversing what has been one of the iron laws of crime.

Brian Lehrer: One more response to Lee's call from another listener who texts about the police shrugging it off. "That's an unacceptable response from the NYPD. That issue needs to be escalated, otherwise it will continue. Police shrugging, police laughing. How does one escalate it?" You want to respond to that quickly?

Elizabeth Glazer: I think Commissioner Tisch needs to take it seriously, and I think that she does take it seriously. I think it goes to a more general feel that people have about the police that they don't wear masks, they're looking at their phone, they're not responsive. This is of course, not true of all police, but there is that general perception that gets amplified when people like Lee and some of your listeners get the response that they do. That has to come from the top, the direction about what the relationship should be between cops and New Yorkers.

Brian Lehrer: Elizabeth Glazer was criminal justice director under Mayor de Blasio. She has since gone on to found the policy journal Vital City. They have just done this deep dive on crime in New York City over the last year and compared to before the pandemic and even back further. Thank you so much for sharing so much of the data and your analysis of it with us.

Elizabeth Glazer: Thanks, Brian, to you and your listeners.

 

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