In this season of miracles, it’s time to celebrate one that benefits all New Yorkers. That would be the city’s astounding record of crime reduction — and crime prevention.
It’s an old story that’s news again because the miracle has been repeated and actually improved upon in 2012. The city is on pace to have about 100 fewer murders than last year’s total of 515 — a decline of 20 percent.
It’s no fluke. Through Dec. 9, the murder rate has fallen 78 percent in the 19-year combined tenure of Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.
In hindsight, the bad old days were even worse than we remember. Consider that in 1990, the city had 2,262 murders as part of a crime tsunami that made our town the Rotten Apple. The tally of seven major crimes, including rape, robbery, burglary and auto theft, hit 527,000.
Through 2011, the comparable number was 107,000 — a drop of nearly 80 percent. Car theft was down 94 percent and is still falling!
Reports of most major crimes have dropped almost every year since 1993, starting with huge declines in the early Giuliani years and smaller, consistent drops through the Bloomberg years. Those things don’t happen on their own.
The NYPD and its commissioners deserve eternal gratitude, but rabid critics would have you believe the gains were achieved through wholesale violations of civil liberties.
Although the ACLU and others are silent now because of the demand for more gun control after the carnage in Connecticut, the thrust of their claim is that young men hanging out on a street corner have more rights to carry an illegal gun than the police have rights to search them.
It’s an extreme position, and now comes more evidence of the damage the critics will cause if they succeed at handcuffing the cops.
Bloomberg last week released statistics showing that the crime drop came even as New York locks up fewer people. With crime down 32 percent since 2001, the city’s incarceration rate has fallen also by 32 percent, he said. With national incarceration rates growing by 5 percent, the city rate is now 27 percent lower than America’s.
“Some people say the only way you stop crime is to incarcerate,” Bloomberg said. “We have proven that to be untrue.”
It’s a counterintuitive trend, and not the only one. Criminal-justice experts insisted crime would rise when the economy fell. That didn’t happen in New York, either. So much for experts.
Bloomberg is admirably firm in defending the police, whom he labels “first preventers.” Now he has proof that aggressive policing reduces both crime and incarceration.
“This was not foreordained,” John Feinblatt, his top policy aide, said publicly about the drop in prisoners. “It is the result of stopping crimes before they happen and keeping those who would have been convicted of those crimes out of jails.”
Seen that way, both crime and punishment are being prevented by the angels in NYPD blue.
That makes it a case of divine intervention, a miracle, even if some refuse to see.
‘Borrowed’ time before the $$ fall
Since everybody says it’s so, it must be true that House Speaker John Boehner suffered an embarrassing defeat when he couldn’t get Republicans to pass his plan to avoid the fiscal cliff. Boehner’s loss means President Obama must have won, because politics is a zero-sum game.
Fair enough, but here’s a better way to look at it: Washington’s score card ignores the best interests of the country. The bottom line of Obama’s victory is that America is the big loser, and will keep losing for generations.
The fiscal cliff was designed to force major decisions about how to reduce the debt and deficit while also creating growth and jobs. Taxes always were a relatively small part of the goal of moving the nation toward a balanced budget.
Even the hikes Obama wanted would close only about 15 percent of the annual deficit. The other 85 percent was barely discussed because Obama and most Democrats don’t want to cut spending, except on the military. Nor are they willing to reform Medicare and Medicaid, whose soaring costs are out of control.
Absent a deal, the United States will keep borrowing nearly $4 billion a day, or 40 cents of every dollar it spends. With those numbers and attitudes, would you lend Obama your money? Of course not.
Yet, the debt and deficit will keep rising — until the whole world turns us down. At which point we’ll need a bailout. Maybe Greece can help.
Obama has worked political miracles, but he hasn’t managed to repeal the laws of economics. No nation ever taxed, borrowed and spent its way to prosperity and security.
Having ignored that history, America seems doomed to repeat it.
As usual, heads roll down-Hill
“Little heads will roll” describes the routine way political bosses protect themselves. When there’s a screw-up, they never face the music. Only underlings walk the plank.
So it is with the terrorist attack that killed our Libyan ambassador and three other Americans last Sept. 11. The State Department probe condemned the failure to protect Ambassador Chris Stevens, but only four mid-level managers were pushed out.
Incredibly, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was never interviewed, even though one of her aides said it was possible she saw cables asking for better security. The aide said this in a congressional hearing that Clinton skipped, citing a recent concussion. Clinton says she’ll testify next month.
Unless she has a good answer for her deadly failures, Clinton’s headache from the episode could last a long time, maybe even into 2016. That would deliver at least some justice to this sordid saga.
Rehabbing Hagel
For a minute there, Chuck Hagel’s possible nomination as the next secretary of defense was in trouble. He’s been a dove toward Iran and Hamas, a hawk against Israel and a relentless critic of the defense budget. And, in what looked like the final straw, it was revealed that as a Republican senator in 1998, he voted against confirming a gay man as our ambassador to Luxembourg, saying an “openly, aggressively gay” person should not represent the United States.
With The New York Times finally interested, Hagel smelled trouble — and quickly apologized. He said his 1998 comments were “insensitive” and that “I am fully supportive of ‘open service’ and committed to LGBT military families.”
He hasn’t retracted or addressed his other troublesome positions, but he shouldn’t worry. No need to sweat the small stuff.
Long a hot topic
You can’t escape the global-warming debate. I saw a good movie the other day where a leading character said this: “We don’t seem to get the big snows we used to get when we were kids. It might have something to do with the atomic bomb.”
The movie was “Holiday Affair.” It was made in 1949.