Member-only story
Recently, a friend on Facebook shared the following opinion piece written by the New York Post: “Crime is up — and it feels like the city is headed back to the 1970s” by John Podhoretz. After reading it, curiosity got the better of me, since other articles I’ve perused over the past year seem to imply that the general trend of crime in New York City is that it has been steadily decreasing.
This was an interesting tidbit to me since this piece noted that:
… according to official statistics, the number of similar crimes in this precinct has doubled over the same period last year — and by nearly 27 percent over the past two years. Petty larcenies are up 22 percent. The numbers don’t lie. The 24th Precinct, my home now and in my childhood, is becoming far less safe.
This statistic seemed rather alarming to me, so I tried to find some numbers to corroborate it. Thanks to efforts like OpenData NYC, historical crime data (and much more) is now readily available and easily accessible. The most useful and direct source that I found was actually the NYPD’s crime statistics page, which provided historical felony, non-felony, misdemeanor, and violation data in either PDF form or Excel spreadsheets, the latter of which could be easily converted to CSV. For convenience, I archived the CSVs as a gist on my personal GitHub.