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Brian Lairer on WNYC, how much crime is there in New York City really?

The Policy Journal, Vital City, has a new special issue with a very deep dive into the actual numbers of different kinds of crime from before the pandemic until now.

Vital City's founder, Elizabeth Glazer, joins us now. She was previously

director of the New York City Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice under Mayor de Blasio.

Some of the trends may surprise you as we look at these numbers, and hopefully they'll

suggest the best ways to reduce crime, and hopefully without going to overly punitive mass

incarceration policies, if both

those things can be accomplished at the same time.

Liz, thanks for this research and for sharing it with us.

Welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks so much, Brian, for having me.

And starting with kind of a top line comparison, you have the major crimes, murder, rape, felony,

assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny, and grand larceny of a motor vehicle.

Anything you want to say about the pandemic as an era-defining driver of the major crimes

to start out?

Yeah, very much so.

So, I mean, New York City is a very safe city, but compared to the city we were before the,

you know, before the pandemic, we're about 30% higher in all those major crimes than we were in 2019.

And, you know, so New Yorkers are jittery, and there's a reason.

Those crimes are coming down. That's good. But they're still very much up from before the

pandemic. And what that rise is masking is a different kind of trend in the kind of violence that people are experiencing on

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