The black population of NYC, 25%, produces 60% of the murders and murderers.
Today's papers A summary of what's in the major U.S. newspapers.
Safe in the City
By Michael Brus
Posted Saturday, Dec. 31, 2005, at 6:08 AM ET
The NYT leads with the news that crime has dropped in New York City for the 17th consecutive year. The Washington Post leads with a long investigation of ties between Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, and a curious "grassroots" advocacy group called the U.S. Family Network. The Wall Street Journal tops its news box with the latest from Iraq: Gas lines mushroomed as subsidies were cut, Ahmad Chalabi was put in charge of the oil ministry, and 17 died in insurgent violence in Baghdad. All the papers front an Egyptian police raid on a Sudanese-refugee squatter camp in downtown Cairo. At least 23 refugees died in the crackdown.
About 2,000 refugees from Sudan had for three months been squatting on a large traffic island in a posh neighborhood of Cairo, across from the offices of the U.N.'s refugee agency. (The U.N. has denied Sudanese emigrants refugee status since warring factions in Sudan signed a peace treaty earlier this year.) After months of fruitless negotiations with the squatters, the U.N. office told the police it thought the refugees might attack. About 3,000 police surrounded the refugees, tried to drag them into buses, shot them with water cannons, and then went in with batons swinging. Some Sudanese fought back with bottles and poles. The police took the Sudanese to several detention centers and have already begun to release some. The NYT reports that at least half of the dead were women and children. Egypt blamed the deaths on a stampede. A reporter for the LAT finds English language kits among the debris at the camp site. The WP and NYT both front the same dramatic photo, and all the papers have great wire-service pics on their web sites.
New York City's declining crime rate is nothing new, of course; the press has covered the trend heavily since the mid-'90s. Even so, the numbers are staggering. Consider: As of yesterday, there were 537 homicides in the city. That's the lowest figure since 1963, and compares to a high of 2,245 in 1990. Auto thefts declined 12 percent from last year. Shootings rose by 3.2 percent, but are still at their second-lowest level since 1993. And lest anyone pin these numbers solely on national trends, the article notes that murders have been on the rise in Philadelphia, Boston, and Houston. Some things, however, haven't changed. As a graphic accompanying the article shows, nearly six out of ten murderers, and nearly six out of ten murder victims, were black—in a city where one in four residents is black.
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