Supposed low crime rates in New York have had leftists crowing and some on the right choosing to eat crow.
Low crimes in the city are still the legacy of the Giuliani era. But the reality is that crime rate trends are very tricky to nail down. Anyone who reports on crime rates knows how many ways big cities can massage their numbers to artificially lower crime rates. Many of them involve varieties of off-the-books accounting. Certain categories of crimes can be artificially lowered by recategorizing individual crimes.
But public assaults like this are hard to sweep under the rug.
MIDTOWN, Manhattan (WABC) - A spray of gunfire sent people scattering in every direction in Midtown on Sunday evening.
Witnesses say they heard several back-to-back shots followed by people running in a panic. When police arrived they discovered three men shot along West 31st Street near Broadway. Investigators say some sort of dispute outside a liquor store quickly escalated into gunfire just before 5 p.m.
That's a few blocks from the Empire State Building. It's not a great area. Largely due to the presence of certain businesses. But it's not murder city either.
It really says something that you have gang violence breaking out there.
And, in other crime-free city news,
Police are on the lookout for two men wanted in connection with two robberies.
One was in Brooklyn and one in Queens, and they happened within the same hour.
Their first target was a deli on Avenue L in Canarsie on January 11th.
They demanded money from an employee and got away with $1,000.
Then just 20 minutes later, the same bandits hit another deli in Ozone Park where they took $1900 and a cell phone.
We don't know what the actual crime rates look like. But high profile crimes make it harder to hide the truth.