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Commentary By Rafael A. Mangual

New York Has All It Needs to Reverse the Crime Crisis — except Leadership

Public Safety Policing, Crime Control

New York state had a violent-crime rate of 1,180.9 per 100,000 and a murder rate of 14.5 per 100,000 in 1990. By 2015, those measures had plummeted to 379.7 and 3.1. That achievement is even more eye-popping when one considers that serious violent crime was (and remains) concentrated in small slices of the state’s urban enclaves, among some of its least-advantaged residents.

Gallons of ink have been spilled over the question of how the victory was achieved. Well, in the lead-up to that win, New York took more aggressive approaches to policing and criminal-justice policy — approaches the state’s new “progressive” elite abhor, writing the success off as coincidence or arguing that the massive public-safety gains weren’t worth the costs of aggressive law enforcement.

New Yorkers — not just here in the Big Apple but also in Syracuse, Buffalo, Albany and Rochester — have seen safety and public order deteriorate the last few years. Again, progressive policymakers and reform advocates would have us believe the decline has nothing to do with the decidedly less aggressive approaches to policing and (especially) criminal-justice policy taken throughout the state over the last decade.

Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post

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Rafael Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He is also the author of Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most. Adapted from the Empire Center’s The Next New York series.

Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images