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NYPD Commissioner Bratton Downplays Recent Crime Spike

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NYPD Commissioner William Bratton wrote an exclusive article in the New York Post on Tuesday, June 9.

NYPD Commissioner William Bratton insists that the stop-and-frisk policy does not have a significant effect on the city’s crime rates; more specifically, he says the decrease in the use of the controversial technique is in no way to blame for the recent increase in shoot-ings.

On Tuesday, June 9, the recent spike in violent crimes was not mentioned at the annual NYPD medal ceremony; despite the release of Bratton’s article on the topic in the New York Post the same day.

According to Bratton, the current state of crime in New York City is not as bad as critics have made it out to be.

Bratton wrote, “The armchair criminologists writing these columns are verging on hysteria with their predictions of impending doom. As of the end of May, we were up 22 murders citywide and 33 shootings over a period of five months in a city of 8.5 million people. Back in 1993, when we averaged about 37 murders and 100 shootings per week, these recent increases would not have amounted to even a week’s worth of murders and shoot-ings.”

Throughout the article Bratton quotes several crime statistics, and there relationship to the use of stop-and-frisk techniques. He points out that overall the city is a much safer place today than in it has been in the past.

Bratton wrote: “In 2011, the NYPD reported about 685,000 reasonable-suspicion stops. That year, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries and grand larcenies all increased, for an overall rise in index crime of 1.5 percent. Last year, stops had been cut to about 47,400 — or by more than 90 percent — and murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary and grand lar-ceny were all down, for an overall decline in index crime of 4.1 percent.

In 2011, there were 515 murders and 1,510 shootings. In 2014, there were 333 murders and 1,171 shootings. Clearly, the supposed relationship between decreasing stops and in-creasing crime is not supported by the numbers… Yet, even with these increases, the past two years have seen the lowest levels in shootings since 1993 and the lowest levels in murder since 1957.”

320 officers make the shift from desk duty to the streets in some of the city’s most high crime areas on Wednesday, June 10, as part of the mayor’s Summer All Out program.

PBA president Pat Lynch said, “It’ll help in the short term, but it’s a Band-Aid approach.”

The mayor has been resisting the City Council’s push to hire 1,000 additional cops. How-ever, a compromise should be worked out before the final budget goes in at the end of June.

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