Perspectives on New York City Crime
Two dimensions of the debate over crime in New York City played out last week in Times Square, the “crossroads of the world” and a neighborhood that embodies New York City to millions of business visitors and tourists each year.
On its northwest reaches sits the Midtown Community Court, which has reopened slowly after a two-year closure. As I reported in The Wall Street Journal, officials are pushing for the “problem-solving” to step up its operations after the number of cases it handles dwindled as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and changes to the state’s criminal-justice laws.
Midtown was one of the first such courts in the nation when it opened in 1993, and the state has replicated the model to address people who repeatedly commit low-level crimes because they lack permanent housing or are struggling with mental-health issues or substance abuse. Case counts in those courts dropped by 2/3 between 2022 and 2019. Josh Solomon honed in this by examining drug courts in a recent Albany Times Union article.
As a result, officials are missing a chance to connect many low-level offenders with housing, drug counseling or other services that might remove them from the streets and stop subsequent offenses, said Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a Democratic state lawmaker from Manhattan. He is pushing to expand the Midtown court’s operations and said its closure forced officials to fight quality-of-life crimes with one hand tied behind their backs.
“It’s a waste of resources not to have it fully operational,” Hoylman-Sigal told me. “It’s in a neighborhood, including Times Square, where these problems persist and have become even more apparent in the wake of Covid.”
The southern part of Times Square was the stage last Tuesday for the unveiling several new robots that the NYPD will begin using this year, I wrote in the Journal. The initiative includes the deployment of a “K5” unit in Times Square that will help beat officers with surveillance. The city also acquired two robotic dogs—which the NYPD calls “Digidogs”—that will be used at incidents such as hostage situations, officials said. Another device will shoot tracking devices onto suspect vehicles.
The NYPD experimented with the robotic dogs in 2021, but it abandoned them over backlash from progressive lawmakers and civil- liberties groups who were concerned about the over-militarization of police. Opponents reiterated the concerns Tuesday.
Mayor Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain who was elected in 2021 on a platform of reducing crime, said the criticism was coming from a vocal minority. He said that police using robotics in the 21st century was akin to the earlier adoption of fingerprint technology.
“If we were not willing to move forward and use technology on how to properly keep cities safe, then you will not keep up with those doing harmful things,” he said. “Digidog is out of the pound.”
The city will lease one K5—which moves similar to a Roomba and looks like a 5-foot R2-D2—for use in the Times Square subway station starting in the summer. The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, an advocacy group, belittled the devices as “knockoff robocops” and said that the city should use its resources in more proven ways.
“The NYPD is turning bad science fiction into terrible policing,” Albert Fox Cahn, the group’s executive director, said in a statement.
New York’s response to the crime uptick that came after the pandemic will be in the spotlight again this week as the U.S. House Judiciary Committee holds a hearing in lower Manhattan on Monday. Republican Rep. Jim Jordan said in the advisory that the hearing will look at “pro-crime, anti-victim policies have led to an increase in violent crime and a dangerous community for New York City residents.”
Adams and other Democratic officials are planning a prebuttal, and say Jordan should look at cities in his native Ohio. Christopher Herrmann, an associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice told WNYC’s Jon Campbell that he believes it’s “much more political than it is meant for crime prevention and crime control purposes."
THE QUESTION: Who was New York City’s first “rat czar?”
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: George Pataki was governor for the latest state budget in history, enacted on August 11, 2004.