New York: Police commanders are almost afraid to mention it. One said Friday that he was too superstitious to talk about the string of days without a killing in New York City.
Asked about it a few hours earlier by Charlie Rose on “CBS This Morning,” William J. Bratton, the police commissioner, shushed the television host.
“We don’t want to jinx it,” Bratton said, grinning.
In his next breath, the commissioner sought to promote the “record” that detectives were embarking on a 12th consecutive day without having to investigate a new homicide.
“And let’s keep it going,” he added.
Crime fluctuates.
There were two stretches in 2009, of nearly a week each, when not a single person was murdered in the five boroughs. Last February, also during a cold snap, saw 10 days between murders. Until Thursday, that was the longest known stretch in “modern times,” Bratton said — or at least back to the early 1990s.
Like weather, criminologists say, all sorts of things can push crime statistics this way or that for brief periods: crime-busting strategies by the police, bursts of violence by gangs and sheer coincidence.
More common trend lines typically reassert themselves over a 12-month period. And, as no recent mayor or police commissioner has lost a chance to say, the city’s bad old days of crime — with murders peaking at 2,245 in 1990 — are long gone.
Last year, there were 333 murders logged, the fewest since 1963, when the department began tracking crime in a way that officials now deem reliable.
“You figure, in 1990, when I first came here, they were doing six murders a day,” Bratton said, answering more questions about the murder rate after a promotion ceremony later Friday.
“And to have in a city of 8 1/2 million people,” he went on, “just think of it, to have 11, 12 days without a murder; we had a couple days in there, I think, where we didn’t have any shootings or stabbings, either. So, it’s just a reflection of just how safe the city has become.”
But there was a burst of killing before February 1, when the last murder occurred. There were 39 murders this year through that date, compared with 33 during the same period a year ago, said Thomas A. Reppetto, a Police Department spokesman who tracks its statistics.
“They went from an 18 per cent increase to a 2 or 3 per cent decrease,” Reppetto said of the murder figures. “The numbers for murder are too few at the present time to draw any further conclusions about what is going to happen with murders this year.”
Reppetto said he would closely watch the number of shooting victims in the city, which he said were “way up,” to 129 through February 8, compared with 102 during the same period a year ago. Though murders edged down slightly last year, compared with 2013, he said that about 100 more people were hit by gunfire.
Indeed, a 19-year-old woman was shot several times in an apparent robbery early Friday as she retrieved her mail in Brooklyn. The woman, who was not immediately identified, was expected to survive, the police said.
A 28-year-old man shot in the head in Queens just before noon, however, was considered gravely wounded, the police said. As the victim struggled to survive at Jamaica Hospital Centre, detectives searched for two people who fled in a dark-coloured vehicle, suspected of trying to end the man’s life and, with it, the city’s murder-free spate.
