So That's How They Do It!

SINCE THE EARLY days of the Giuliani administration, we've been hearing about how the crime rate in New York City has plummeted dramatically. "The Lowest in 10 Years!" we were told, or 20 years, or 45. Subway crime is down. Violent felonies are down. Everything is down, it seems, except bank robberies (and the NYPD reported Friday that even those were down 31 percent now, too).

The drop in the crime rate was such a big deal that former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Giuliani became embroiled in a very public, embarrassing feud over who should get the credit for it (a feud which eventually cost Bratton his job).

Even after Giuliani's law-and-order administration left and Bloomberg moved in, the crime rate continued to fall. It was unbelievable; to read the press releases, it sounded like there is almost no crime at all anywhere in New York. Before long, it seemed, the Post was going to be forced to run screaming front-page headlines about stolen bikes and supermarket express-lane scofflaws.

Well, now the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association has come out and said, in essence, "Eh, we were just making the whole thing up." The numbers were going down, they said, because hundreds of crimes were going unreported by precinct supervisors, and others were being downgraded from felonies to misdemeanors. The whole ruse, at heart, was little more than a desperate PR effort, not just to keep the statistics down, but to force them even lower still in order to make the NYPD (and the mayor) look good.

Okay, now a quick show of hands here—how many of you are really shocked to hear this?