Less policing and less crime?

http://fair.org/home/less-crimefighting-less-crime-wsj-avoids-the-evidence/

Here’s a write-up of the latest annual statistics in the New York Times (12/31/14):

The number of murders in New York City has dropped to what years ago would have seemed like an impossible low: 328 killings recorded in 2014, the lowest figure since at least 1963, when the Police Department began collecting reliable statistics….

Reports of major crimes citywide continued their yearlong decline, to 105,428 through Dec. 28, from 110,728 in the same period in 2013, according to Police Department statistics. Murders dropped from 335 in 2013….

The number of robberies, a bellwether crime that erodes public perception of safety, reached their lowest levels yet recorded, 16,326 through Dec. 28, down 14 percent from 2013. The high point for robberies came in 1981, when the police recorded 107,495.

So the Journal article left out arguably the most interesting part of the story: The NYPD’s backing away from stop-and-frisk and reduced interest in small-time busts was accompanied by a 5 percent reduction in major crimes–in direct contradiction to what one would predict from the “broken windows” theory that is still the official crime-fighting ideology of New York City.

Indeed, the Times story, citing a professor of public policy, points out that “despite a continuation of the steep drop in recorded stop-and-frisk encounters, the department’s philosophy of crime prevention has remained the same between the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations.”