Leftist racial activists railing against police don’t seem to realize that proactive policing has saved thousands of black lives in New York.
Heather Mac Donald defines proactive policing, more popularly known as “broken windows” policing, as “the enforcement of low-level misdemeanor laws regulating public order.” This method of policing has come under attack by the Black Lives Matter movement and their leftist sympathizers after the death of Eric Garner in 2014, but MacDonald points out that “it was Garner’s resistance to arrest that triggered the events leading to his death.”
The statistics prove that thousands of black lives were saved by proactive policing. According to columnist Michael Barone, “Murders declined from 2,262 to 333 in New York, from 987 to 251 in Los Angeles, from 943 to 413 in Chicago,” between 1990-2014.
The New York Post‘s Franklin Zimring provides some more statistics on the remarkable success of proactive policing in New York City:
Statistics illustrate the dramatic “policing difference” enjoyed by New York. While the homicide rate dropped by half in the nine largest cities other than NYC between 1990 and 2009, it dropped by 82 percent here. Rapes dropped 77 percent in New York, compared with a median rate of 49 percent in those other cities.
New York showed larger declines in every major crime, though particularly in robbery, burglary and auto theft. While robberies dropped 49 percent in other major cities, they fell an astounding 84 percent here.
Consider: In 1990, there were 2,272 homicide victims in New York City. If that rate had remained unchanged, more than 2,400 would have been killed in 2013.
Proactive policing has been on the decline in New York. As Mac Donald notes, criminal summonses and arrests have been reduced by 26 percent and 17.4 percent since last year, respectively, and pedestrian stops are expected to decline by 42 percent this year. The results have been deadly: a 20 percent spike in homicides in a year’s time and a 20 percent rise in shootings over two years.
It’s no wonder then that a recent Quinnipiac poll shows that a majority of blacks support proactive policing. It saved thousands of black lives in New York prior to the poisonous rhetoric of Black Lives Matter, and without it more blood has been spilled in the streets of New York.