Talk:Crime in New York City

Chart
It would be good to include a chart so people can see the trends over time. If I had to pick one measure, my suggestion would be murders per 100,000 residents. Murders are just one form of crime, but they have the advantage that they should be pretty accurately reported and relatively insensitive to changes in reporting standards, etc. The point of charting per 100,000 is to correct for changes in population and also to make a chart for New York City directly comparable to a chart for somewhere else (say New York State or Chicago or the US as a whole or whatever).

Crust (talk) 19:09, 27 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Murder is only one type of crime and is the least common crime everywhere. Total index crime rates and violent crime rates paint a more accurate picture of trends over time.
 * There are also problems with comparisons between different municipalities. Smaller jurisdictions have more extreme fluctuations than larger ones for example. There's also the composition of the city. Many if not most of the largest US cities have most of the wealth located in the suburbs, and the most impoverished areas with higher crime rates inside the core city of the metropolitan area. Other cities have more economic diversity between neighborhoods. 2600:4041:569F:7300:459:98F1:1D32:B33B (talk) 15:42, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
 * The line about “spiked ever since the postwar era” is extremely misleading. Editors should watch this article as it may have been deliberately manipulated for right-wing political reasons, to conform to deceitful statements made by politicians. Crime has certainly not spiked “ever since the postwar era.” It spiked from the late 1960s to the early 1990s and has since dropped dramatically. New York is now one of the safest large cities in the US, and its murder rate per 100,000 people is below the national average for the entire USA, per FBI crime statistics. Even the graph used as support for this claim makes it clear that crime has dropped dramatically in recent decades. Pcb02005 (talk) 13:07, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
 * The postwar era refers to the time period following World War II in the US. NYC's rate of violent crime spiked in the 1960s and remained very high before dropping during the 1990s. Most recently the violent crime rate remains elevated compared to the period immediately prior to the pandemic. NYC has a lower murder rate but it ranks fairly average in regards to violent crime compared to large cities. NYC has long had a violent crime rate significantly higher than the national average.72.69.63.157 (talk) 17:38, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

High-profile crimes include...
The section which lists high-profile crimes has no clear inclusion criteria, and some of the crimes (especially recent ones) might have been sensational, but received only short-lived attention. I propose that only entries that have standalone articles, or at least substantial sections in other articles, about the crime, the victim, or the perpetrator should be included. pburka (talk) 19:21, 19 October 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅ Since there have been no objections, I've gone ahead and removed many non-notable crimes from the list. pburka (talk) 20:03, 11 June 2023 (UTC)
 * I know I'm late, but in my own objections, the standards you went by to erase many of the crimes are both unfair and contradictory. Many significant crimes formerly listed after your and other changes are significant in regards to their relation to each other, be it the crimes themselves or the consequences. For example, you erased pages with significant political attention even within the city alone, showed history of corruption, showed attacks on law enforcement, and saw much social reaction, from safety concerns to representation of marginalized populations. You went against your own rules, even! You wiped entries obviously added with pages and sections linked! And for what?! Since I'm here, would you like to discuss this further? I'm still new, I don't know how to put in a template with your username so the code sends you an alert of the reply. ContributingHelperOnTheSide (talk) 00:11, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Which ones specifically do you think should be reinstated? pburka (talk) 01:37, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
 * All of them for now. You can't simply erase major amounts of material without looking at them on a case-by-case basis. Many of them has significant secondary coverage, including some having their own standalone Wikipedia pages. John Yunshire (talk) 10:41, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Which ones specifically do you think shouldn't have been removed? pburka (talk) 16:15, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
 * I think about 80% of them should be removed. There will be a large number of crimes in a very large city. What matters is the stats and trends, not individual, sensational crimes. O3000, Ret. (talk) 18:50, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Anecdotes?
Seems to me like far too many anecdotes of marginal historical importance, and nowhere near enough statistics to get an in-depth understanding. I'm not sure how that decision is made, or who makes it.