Subject: Ted Cruz Was Wrong on Murders in New York, but Perception Is Hard to Shake - NYTimes.com
From: "Bennett, Eric" <[email-masked]>
To: Comm_D <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2016 04:31:29 -0700

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/upshot/ted-cruz-was-wrong-on-murders-in-new-york-but-perception-is-hard-to-shake.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_cn_20160422&nl=first-draft&nl_art=8&nlid=71696274&ref=headline&te=1&_r=0&referer=

Ted Cruz Was Wrong on Murders in New York, but Perception Is Hard to Shake

Misleading Numbers

By TONI MONKOVIC

April 21, 2016

Ted Cruz’s campaign was wrong<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/13/ted-cruzs-campaign-wrongly-implies-that-new-york-citys-murder-rate-is-spiking-under-bill-de-blasio/> last week in saying that<http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/04/13/ted-cruz-radio-ad-intensifies-feud-with-mayor-bill-de-blasio/> New York City murders were up 10 percent. But it wasn’t the first time, and surely won’t be the last, that crime statistics for the city and elsewhere are misunderstood and misrepresented.

In the first few months of 2015, murders did increase, and the city’s tabloids wouldn’t let anybody forget it.

■ The Daily News<http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/murders-20-2015-year-to-year-comparison-nypd-article-1.2134509>: “The murder rate in New York City has spiked an alarming 20 percent in the first two months of the year.”

■ The New York Post<http://nypost.com/2015/05/26/youre-45-more-likely-to-be-murdered-in-de-blasios-manhattan/>: “You’re 45 percent more likely to be murdered in de Blasio’s Manhattan.”

■ In September, USA Today wrote:<http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/09/21/uptick-in-murder-rate-has-new-yorkers-worried-expert-blames-change-in-police-tactics-and-new-drug-epidemic/72570068/> “A bloody weekend in New York that saw eight shooting deaths could signal that out-of-control gun violence may return to the city. If the trend continues, New York City may see its first uptick in the homicide rate after 25 years of decline.”

That last part was not true. In the decades of declining murders in the city — from 2,245 killings<http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/23/nyregion/new-york-killings-set-a-record-while-other-crimes-fell-in-1990.html> in 1990 to 328 in 2014 — murders rose in some years<http://citylimits.org/2015/09/23/whos-to-blame-for-politicizing-nycs-crime-statistics/>, only to resume falling.

Here’s how the murder numbers actually played out in the city last year, after the 20 percent increase in March noted by The Daily News.

■ In May, a commentary in The Wall Street Journal, on “the new nationwide crime wave<http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-nationwide-crime-wave-1432938425>,” noted that murders were up in the city by nearly 13 percent.

■ In September, The New York Times<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/us/murder-rates-rising-sharply-in-many-us-cities.html> reported on a sharp rise in murders in big cities, and included New York. By that point, the increase was 9 percent.

■ At the end of the year, the increase was a mere 4.5 percent (although The New York Post still described it as a murder-plagued year<http://nypost.com/2016/01/02/teens-death-caps-off-citys-murder-plagued-2015/>.)

Two weeks ago, the city announced a big drop<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nypd-low-crime-first-quarter-2016_us_5702b0dae4b0a06d580653e3> in major crimes in the first quarter of 2016, with the fewest murders in that period since records were kept. “We are the safest big city in America,” Mayor Bill de Blasio<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/bill_de_blasio/index.html?inline=nyt-per> said. “This quarter’s statistics prove it once again.”

<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/17/upshot/100000004336365.embedded.html>

Graphic | The Great Decline The decrease in murders is more impressive when you consider that the city has grown in population by 1.2 million in the last quarter-century.

From April 1 of last year to April 1 of this year, the murder numbers were essentially flat, as they have been since Mr. de Blasio took office in 2014.

The left-leaning Brennan Center of Justice, pointing to evidence that claims of rising crime nationally were overblown, wrote<https://www.brennancenter.org/press-release/final-2015-crime-stats-claims-rising-crime-overblown-evidence-shows>, “Since murder rates vary widely from year to year, one year’s increase is not evidence of a coming wave of violent crime.” (On Wednesday, the Brennan Center released its final analysis for 2015<http://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/crime-2015-final-analysis> and found “that overall crime rates in America’s 30 largest cities were nearly identical from 2014 to 2015.”)

Of course, some mini-trends can’t be<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/us/violence-surges-in-chicago-even-as-policing-debate-rages-on.html> ignored, but small sample sizes often lead to corrections. Regression to the mean is the same principle by which most baseball fans know not to get excited when a player is hitting .480 this time of year. (He probably won’t be the first batter to surpass .400 since Ted Williams in 1941.)

That also means that you can’t get too excited about the numbers that the city promoted two weeks ago. They’re not predictive. In fact, they could merely set up people for further panic if the numbers “spike” in the summer, with regression to the mean possibly flowing in the other direction.

Another reason for misunderstanding crime statistics is, surprise, politics. As a presidential candidate in January, well before Mr. Cruz’s false claim, Chris Christie said<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/01/08/recidivism-watch-christie-on-murder-rates-in-new-york-city/> murders were up 11 percent in New York City, blaming liberals like President Obama and Mr. de Blasio.

New York is one of the more liberal cities in the country, but Republicans controlled the mayoralty for 20 years starting with Rudolph Giuliani in 1994, in part because of the potency of crime as an issue. Even before Mr. de Blasio took office, some Republicans predicted that, with liberals back in charge, New York would return to the lawlessness of old. Any increase in crime could be used as a cudgel, but what constitutes an increase in crime can be open to interpretation<http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-make-sense-of-conflicting-confusing-and-misleading-crime-statistics/>.

Add a layer of personal rivalry on top of the politics: The former police commissioner Raymond Kelly questioned <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/02/nyregion/for-bratton-and-kelly-linked-legacies-and-longstanding-tension.html> the accuracy of statistics under William Bratton’s watch, and “that led to thunderbolts being slung both ways,” The Times reported<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/nyregion/bratton-rebukes-kelly-for-questioning-new-york-crime-data-shame-on-him.html>.

But it’s harder to manipulate murder statistics. And it’s hard to argue against taking the longer view, as Jarrett Murphy of City Limits wrote<http://citylimits.org/2015/09/23/whos-to-blame-for-politicizing-nycs-crime-statistics/>:

“It would be a huge accomplishment if we could all move beyond treating the crime numbers as some sort of month-to-month scoreboard — for de Blasio versus Bloomberg, for community policing versus stop-and-frisk<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/stop_and_frisk/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>, for the 20-year” feud between Ray Kelly and Bill Bratton.

“That starts with looking at what the numbers have shown us over time: many decreases, a few upticks and no evidence that any mayor has abdicated his duty to the city.”

The most egregious misunderstanding of all is that the public doesn’t seem to know that crime has dropped significantly in the long term. Nationally, we have 8,000 fewer murders per year than we did a little over 20 years ago; 8,000 killings is equivalent to having a San Bernardino terrorism massacre<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/san-bernardino-shooting.html> every day for a year combined with Sept. 11 fatalities.

Try telling people at a dinner party about the great news, and you might get quizzical looks; that two-minute segment on the local news about a grisly murder the previous night probably carries a lot more weight. Justin Wolfers wrote for The Upshot in 2014<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/upshot/perceptions-havent-caught-up-to-decline-in-crime.html> that perceptions haven’t caught up to “one of the most striking trends over recent decades.” A Gallup poll just two weeks ago said Americans’ concern about crime and violence was at its highest point in 15 years<http://www.gallup.com/poll/190475/americans-concern-crime-climbs-year-high.aspx?g_source=Politics&g_medium=newsfeed&g_campaign=tiles>.

Charles W. Cooke of National Review wrote<http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427758/careful-panic-violent-crime-and-gun-crime-are-both-dropping-charles-c-w-cooke> last year:

Most people with whom I have spoken simply will not accept that things are better today than they were ten years ago — or, for that matter, that America is safer today than it has been for a long, long time. All told, this is rather strange, because the data are quite clear.

A country that doesn’t understand that crime has declined is a country that will probably be less likely to accept criminal justice reform. Although there has been rare bipartisan support for that reform, not everyone is on board<https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/11/06/the-dissenters?ref=collections#.oBYidVFtR>.

It seems safe to predict that politicians will play on people’s fears if they can gain from it — the sample sizes for forecasting that type of opportunism are large and go back a long way<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/05/us/politics/bipartisan-criminal-justice-overhaul-is-haunted-by-willie-horton.html>.

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