NEW YORK LETTER
Figures that had not been seen since the 1950s. With 290 murders in 2017, the American metropolis, populated by 8.5 million inhabitants, saw its homicide rate drop to 3.3 per hundred thousand inhabitants (against 5 in Corsica according to the French Ministry of the Interior). You have to go back decades to find such statistics: when West Side Story premiered in 1957 on Broadway, there were only 314 recorded murders in New York.
It is also a vertiginous drop since the record of 2,245 reached in 1991. A happy news, in a period when the attention is focused on terrorist attacks, shootings in schools or the murderous shootings of police officers. black youth. New York City Police Chief James O’Neill rejoiced earlier this year: “New York is not the violent nightmare you see in the media, on television and in movies. It is home, and we will fight for it ”, he said, while the mayor of the city, Bill de Blasio, congratulated: “No one thought that it would be possible to fall under the 300 murders”, emphasizing the 2,000 lives saved each year.
The terror of gangs in the 1990s
Violence soared in the 1990s, as the city was plagued by gangs in the midst of the drug war. The response was brutal, with a policy of repression and massive incarceration, the city’s prisons accommodating at the time more than 20,000 people. The interesting phenomenon is that of recent years: the city is experiencing a drop in crime which coincides with the decline in the prison population (there are now less than 9,000 prisoners in New York jails) and the decline in arrests.
One of the explanations is the gentrification of New York, which has become a city of sores, but it is not completely satisfactory, according to the Wall Street Journal, who notes that in Los Angeles, a city that followed the same path as New York, crime declined in areas where unemployment and poverty soared while it declined in Washington before the gentrification of the federal capital.
One of the explanations relates to the change in the methods used by the police. She used algorithms to analyze the crime map and post police and cameras in areas where violence was most likely to occur.
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