The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/crime-trends/)
The New York Times Magazine examines whether Baltimore, whose 2017 murder rate led big cities, can overcome its destructive crime issues under former New Orleans police commissioner Michael Harrison.
Mayor Mike Duggan wants to change his city’s reputation as one of the nation’s most violent. Besides more police, he wants to expand a network of surveillance cameras.
An official said the biggest problems were concentrated in several neighborhoods where 15 murders have occurred so far this year, mostly driven by drugs and gangs, or arguments between acquaintances.
Journalist Alex Kotlowitz spent four years immersed in Chicago’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Ultimately, he couldn’t explain why crime rates go up and down.
There were 55 hate crimes reported in NYC this year as of Feb. 17, an increase of 72 percent over the same period last year, the NYPD said. Anti-Semitic crimes made up almost two-thirds of that, for a total of 36 crimes reported so far this year, compared with 21 last year.
Subway crime rose last year, but has gone way down since 1990. Transit police chief Edward Delatorre said the number of crimes is so small, that “one or two recidivist offenders can enter the system and throw the crime numbers out of whack.”
Nearly 64 percent of federal offenders who had been convicted of violent offenses and were released in 2005 were rearrested for a new crime or for a violation of their supervision conditions within the next eight years, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reports. That compared to a rearrest rate of 39.9 percent by nonviolent offenders.
Law enforcement officials promise a crackdown. Puerto Rico’s murder rate is far lower than its peak of seven years ago, but it is four times that of the mainland U.S. and is more in line with countries like Mexico.
The combined homicide total in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose dropped 26 percent in the last two years. Officials credit both new technologies and trusted policing techniques.
D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham is trying to focus on gun crimes. “When you look at our known homicide offenders in the city, about 40 percent of those have a prior gun arrest,” he said. “At all levels of the criminal justice system, we have to do better.”