Crime in New York City

The drop in crime has been variously attributed to a number of factors, including these changes to policing, the end of the crack epidemic, the increased incarceration rate nationwide,[2][3] gentrification,[7] an aging population, and the decline of lead poisoning in children.

[citation needed] In 1835, the New York Herald was established by James Gordon Bennett, Sr., who helped revolutionize journalism by covering stories that appeal to the masses including crime reporting.

[10] Helen Jewett was an upscale New York City prostitute whose 1836 murder, along with the subsequent trial and acquittal of her alleged killer, Richard P. Robinson, generated an unprecedented amount of media coverage.

[14][15] Initially intended to express anger at the draft, the protests turned into a race riot, with white rioters, mainly but not exclusively Irish immigrants,[13] attacking blacks wherever they could be found.

The conditions in the city were such that Major General John E. Wool, commander of the Department of the East, stated on July 16 that, "Martial law ought to be proclaimed, but I have not a sufficient force to enforce it.

[134] Another theory is that widespread exposure to lead pollution from automobile exhaust, which can lower intelligence and increase aggression levels, incited the initial crime wave in the mid-20th century, most acutely affecting heavily trafficked cities like New York.

The IRT Lexington Avenue Line was known to be frequented by muggers, so in February 1979, a group headed by Curtis Sliwa began unarmed patrols of the 4 train during the night time, in an effort to discourage crime.

Finally, on September 11, 1979, Garelik was fired, and replaced with Deputy Chief of Personnel James B. Meehan, reporting directly to City Police Commissioner Robert J. McGuire.

When in 1993, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir were elected to official positions, the Broken Windows strategy was more widely deployed in New York under the rubrics of "zero tolerance" and "quality of life".

[162] In December 2012, the president of the Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva University apologized over allegations that two rabbis at the college's high school campus abused boys there in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

This voluntary rule book included a 58-point security plan drafted in part by the New York Nightlife Association, was further recommended by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Speaker Christine Quinn.

[166][167][168] The Club Enforcement Initiative was created by the NYPD in response to what it referred to as "a series of high-profile and violent crimes against people who visited city nightclubs this year", mentioning the July 27 rape and murder of Jennifer Moore.

[175] In a 2007 paper, economist Jessica Reyes attributes a 56 percent drop in nationwide violent crime in the 1990s to the removal of lead (a neurotoxin that causes cognitive and behavioral problems) from gasoline.

This involved crackdowns on relatively minor offenses such as graffiti, turnstile jumping, and aggressive "squeegeemen", on the principle that this would send a message that order would be maintained and that the city would be "cleaned up".

In 1994, in one of his first initiatives, Bratton instituted CompStat, a comparative statistical approach to mapping crime geographically to identify emerging criminal patterns and chart officer performance by quantifying apprehensions.

In a case less nationally publicized than those of Louima and Diallo, unarmed bar patron Patrick Dorismond was killed shortly after declining the overtures of what turned out to be an undercover officer soliciting illegal drugs.

Even while hundreds of outraged New Yorkers protested, Giuliani staunchly supported the New York City Police Department, going so far as to take the unprecedented step of releasing Dorismond's "extensive criminal record" to the public,[190] for which he came under wide criticism.

"[207] In July 2007, the city planned to install an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists called Lower Manhattan Security Initiative.

The murder rate in New York City had declined from its 1990 mid-Dinkins-administration historic high of 2,254 to 1,927, when Kelly left in 1994,[221] and continued to plummet even more steeply under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg.

As commissioner of the NYPD under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Kelly had often appeared at outreach events such as the Brooklyn's annual West Indian Day Parade, where he was photographed playing the drums and speaking to community leaders.

"[226] Under Mayor Bloomberg, Kelly's NYPD also incurred criticism for its handling of the protests surrounding the 2004 Republican National Convention, which resulted in the City of New York having to pay out millions in settlement of lawsuits for false arrest and civil rights violations, as well as for its rough treatment of credentialed reporters covering the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

This, coupled with a stagnant economy and an extremely high unemployment rate, attracted increased social problems including the proliferation of street gangs and a large number of squatters.

During the game, as ABC switched to a generic helicopter shot of the exterior of Yankee Stadium, an uncontrolled fire could clearly be seen burning in the ravaged South Bronx surrounding the park.

The local police precincts – already struggling and failing to contain the Bronx's massive wave of drug and gang crime – had long since stopped bothering to investigate the fires, since there were too many to track.

After President Jimmy Carter personally visited Charlotte Street in 1977, he ordered the head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to take steps to salvage the area.

[265] Despite significant investment compared to the post-war period, many exacerbated social problems remain in many neighborhoods including high rates of violent crime, substance abuse, overcrowding, and substandard housing conditions.

In 1964, a race riot started in Harlem, Manhattan, after an Irish NYPD lieutenant, Thomas Gilligan shot and killed a black teenager named James Powell, who was only 15.

[277] Race riots followed in 1967 and 1968 as part of the political and racial tensions in the United States of the era, aggravated by high unemployment among blacks, de facto segregation in housing, and the failure to enforce civil rights laws.

Through an evolutionary process, however, some commercial entities have created turnkey packages including computer systems, software, mobile devices, and other implements collectively assembled under the heading of CompStat.

[310] On October 31, 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit blocked the order requiring changes to the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk program and removed Judge Shira Scheindlin from the case.