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| Mayor Bill de Blasio at a news conference in Brooklyn on Tuesday with Police Commissioner William J. Bratton and Public Advocate Letitia James. Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times |
N.Y. Times
Mayor Bill de Blasio declared that New York, which his opponents once said would grow more dangerous under his watch, had in fact become even safer.
Robberies, considered the most telling indicator of street crime, are down 14 percent across New York City from last year. Grand larcenies — including the thefts of Apple devices that officials said drove an overall crime increase two years ago — are also down, by roughly 3 percent.
And after a record-low 335 homicides in 2013, the city has seen 290 killings in the first 11 months of this year, a number unheard-of two decades ago.
Even shootings, which had increased by more than 10 percent earlier this year, have receded amid a push by the Police Department to stamp out troublesome pockets of gun violence. There were just over 1,000 shootings in the first 11 months of this year, about a 4 percent increase over last year.
For Mr. de Blasio and his police commissioner, William J. Bratton, the numbers provided a kind of cushion for the criminal justice and policing reforms that both men are putting into place.
Officers will this week begin a pilot program of wearing body cameras in three police commands, Mr. Bratton said on Tuesday, and a wholesale retraining of the department’s patrol force is also starting. A new marijuana policy aimed at reducing low-level arrests, which was announced in November, has already resulted in a 61.2 percent decline in arrests in its first two full weeks.
Indeed, Mr. de Blasio pointed to 20 years of “momentum” that he inherited, referring to an “arc of continuous progress across different mayors, different commissioners.” He expressed pride in the performance of the Police Department over the first 11 months of this year, and declined to describe the continued decline as vindication of his reform-minded policies.Others were more ready to do so.
“Bravo!” wrote Joseph J. Lhota on Twitter, who as the Republican candidate for mayor last year ran ads predicting a return to the crime-plagued streets of the early 1990s if Mr. de Blasio were elected.
With a month still to go before the end of the year, the favorable crime numbers appeared to render a verdict on at least one question: Would a vast decline in the number of recorded stop-and-frisk encounters create an opening for violence to return? So far, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton said, the answer has been no.
Mr. Bratton said that by the end of the year there would be fewer than 50,000 such stops, down from a high of over 685,000 in 2011.
With fewer crimes, detectives have found themselves with more time to devote to investigations, said Robert K. Boyce, the chief of detectives. The rate at which homicide cases are closed — usually with an arrest — reached 77 percent this year.
“It’s the highest I’ve seen,” said Chief Boyce, who joined the department in 1983.
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Another Look At De Blasio's Plans For Carriage Horses
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| A horse waiting for a customer at Grand Army Plaza, near Central Park. Legislation to be introduced in the City Council would ban carriage horses in the city. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times |
Mayor Bill de Blasio declared this week that he will carry out a promise made during the mayoral campaign: to rid the city of the carriage horse.
Legislation will be introduced in the City Council any minute now, the mayor said, but many details remain to be aired out.
That makes the moment pregnant with questions.
Such as:
Is the still-unseen de Blasio plan good for horses or for people interested in developing the Midtown West real estate where they live?
Once the horses are banished, what will become of their stables and the 64,000 square feet of lots that they sit on, their value swelling by the day?
And what of the 220 or so carriage horses that now live in sprinkler-equipped homes and enjoy regular veterinary examinations and five weeks in the country annually? The group leading the campaign to ban the carriage horse, New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Safe Streets, said it and other groups, like the Humane Society and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, would ensure the well-being of the steeds.
“We’d be happy to provide lifetime care for all these animals,” Allie Feldman, the NYClass executive director, said. This is an offer that sets off fireworks at Burgundy Brook Farm in Palmer, Mass., a sanctuary and rescue farm for work horses where a number of carriage horses have retired.
“The horses in New York City are some of the healthiest and best taken care of I’ve ever seen,” said Pamela Rickenbach, the executive director of Blue Star Equiculture, which runs the farm.
Offering them new homes is like giving away ice in the winter.
“Those horses are not going to have any problem with finding a home,” she said. “They are so well adjusted to begin with. They are selected for their intelligence and their temperament.”
Horses with jobs, like pulling carriages, have pretty good homes already, Ms. Rickenbach and others said. But, they said, there is a national crisis of homeless horses — beautiful creatures who are expensive to provide for.
“We are completely over-full and overwhelmed,” Ms. Rickenbach said. “It seems impossible to address the problems of the homeless horse. Every day I could send them horses that need homes.”
Many horses that either land at the rescue farm, or in the rural community she lives in, are “in need of medical attention, or they’re underfed, starving.”
New York City and the animals that live here are not immune to the laws of supply and demand, and the mayor and council members who support the carriage horse ban ought to look at an earlier example of good intentions with horses that went awry.
The United States effectively banned slaughter of horses at the end of 2006, according to a 2011 report by the Government Accountability Office, but the story took some bad turns.
“Horse welfare in the United States has generally declined since 2007,” the report found, citing increased abandonment and reports of neglect. “Abandoned, abused and neglected horses present challenges for state and local governments, tribes and animal welfare organizations.”
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NYC Aims to Divert Mentally Ill From Jail’s Revolving Door
It is hard to walk the halls of the Criminal Courts Building in Manhattan without encountering stories of crimes committed by people with mental illnesses. On Monday, two separate murder cases were being tried against men who had presented evidence they were psychotic when they stabbed their victims to death.
In a third courtroom, a homeless man with a history of mental illness, who had been jailed several times before for minor crimes, was scheduled to be arraigned on attempted murder charges after being accused of stabbing a street vendor in the chest with a pair of scissors.
Those are the nightmare cases, defense lawyers and prosecutors say, horrific situations in which people who never received effective treatment for mental illnesses ended up committing violent crimes.
Those are the nightmare cases, defense lawyers and prosecutors say, horrific situations in which people who never received effective treatment for mental illnesses ended up committing violent crimes.
But every day, dozens of people with fragile psyches are arraigned in Manhattan for minor crimes. Many cannot make bail and are remanded to Rikers Island, where they seldom receive the medical care they need, criminal justice experts said. These defendants often leave jail with a weaker hold on sanity than when they entered. A few go on to commit worse offenses.
“What we have been doing to try to keep mentally ill offenders from cycling in and out of the system has not worked well enough,” the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced an ambitious $130 million plan to break that pattern, to screen out nonviolent defendants with mental illnesses before arraignment and divert many more of them to supervised release programs or to treatment programs, rather than holding them in jail.
Many parts of Mr. de Blasio’s plan have yet to be fully developed or put into effect, and will take shape over the next year, possibly in the form of pilot projects. Some of his proposals will build on existing diversion programs and a supervised release system.
More than a decade ago, the judiciary established mental health courts to handle cases in which both sides agree treatment is a better outcome than incarceration. Those courts have dealt with 2,900 defendants in the city since 2002.
Mr. Vance said one important provision in the plan was the training of police officers to spot signs of mental illness, which his office is underwriting with $15 million in forfeiture funds. The officers will then have the option, without booking them, to take people accused of minor crimes to newly established community drop-off centers, where they can receive treatment and counseling, rather than putting them through the court system .
Another important plank of the plan is the expansion of a supervised release program to 3,400 slots, from 1,100, Mr. Vance said. Under that program, defendants can avoid jail if social workers stay in close touch with them while a case is pending and they agree to go to mental health services and drug treatment. The additional 2,300 slots will be made available to mentally troubled people.
The city also plans in January to begin systematic screening in Manhattan by sending health care workers into the central booking office at 100 Centre Street, armed with diagnostic questionnaires for defendants before they are arraigned.
At present, medics from the Fire Department do a brief health screening of defendants during the booking process. But it is generally left to public defenders and social workers in the arraignment courts to identify people who might be candidates for diversion to mental health treatment, and to make a proposal to a judge.
Seymour W. James Jr., attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society, said the current efforts to identify mentally ill people before arraignment were spotty at best. People with undisclosed mental problems often appear risky to judges and have bails imposed upon them that they cannot pay, he said.
“To have someone screening individuals early can make a world of difference,” he said. “They deteriorate in Rikers Island.”
The mayor’s plan also aims to persuade judges to reduce the use of bail. New York judges can consider only the risk of flight in setting bail. As a result, bail is often imposed on mentally ill defendants, who often have vague work histories, little money and a record of minor arrests, defense lawyers said.
But the mayor’s plan calls for the development of some scientific guidelines over the next year to help judges weigh defendants’ risk of flight if they enter a supervised release program. That approach has worked in Washington, and in some jurisdictions in Kentucky, officials said.