Homicides were down in the first quarter, but the statistics don’t stem anxiety that the city might be regressing to a violent past.

by Ali Watkins and Troy Closson
New York Times
April 6, 2022

… As weary New Yorkers start to emerge from more than two years of pandemic limbo, a gap has opened between perceptions of crime and the realities of the city. This New York is more dangerous by some measures than the one many residents lived in at the start of the pandemic, in the spring of 2020. Yet it remains far safer than in previous years, and crime is lower than in many of the nation’s largest cities.

… “It reminds me of the 1990s, in the sense that every incident of violence becomes a major news story,” said Jeffrey Butts, director of the research and evaluation center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Some of these things are just shocking,” he said. “But it’s also important to remember that these things have always happened, and still been fairly infrequent incidents. But they stay with you for so long and stick in your memory.”

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