An amazing statistic

The front page of the NY Times had an amazing statistic today.

New York City is on pace to have fewer than 500 murders this year.

It was only in 1990, a mere 17 years ago that the city hit it's alltime high with almost 3000 murders.

Remember, this is in a city of 8.2 million residents.

But what makes this number truly astounding, is that with over half of the cases carefully reviewed, only 35 involved strangers.

That means that less than 20% of the cases fall into the stereotypical vision of NY, violent crime run amok.

Over 80% of the cases involved people that knew each other. From spouses, girl-boyfriends, even drug buys between dealers and their users.

But the idea of rampant, anonymous killings on the streets of NY seems to be gone.

What criminologists say is that it would be virtually impossible to reduce this number any farther.

The police obviously can't get into everybody's homes to prevent these crimes, so, we may have seen the bottom.

In the previous decade and a half, this continuous reduction in the number of homicides, has corresponded with a reduction in crime in general, and specifically in violent crime. Hopefully, the overall reduction can continue to decline.