Maria Haymandou’s latest blog post
Back in the day, New York City wasn’t the same place that it is now, with crime being rampant. Many of the areas of Manhattan that are the “happening” places now, such as Alphabet City, Williamsburg the Meatpacking District and Hell’s Kitchen, were places that nobody in their right mind would ever go, unless they were looking to get killed and/or robbed. Of course, it’s all changed now, and the NYPD has been receiving praise for bringing the crime rate in New York City to an historic low; 2013’s homicide rate was the lowest since the NYPD started keeping track in the early 1960s. However, there is a large number of New Yorkers who aren’t happy about this; New York has been host to about 1,500 unsolved murders in the past decade. Given the decrease in murders, some feel that the NYPD should be spending their time getting more killers off the streets. Thousands of murderers are currently escaping justice in New York, and that’s a scary thing to think about.
As the homicide rate plummeted in the 1990s and activity on the cold case squad of the NYPD was at an all-time high, the clearance rate shot up to over 80% during the final years of the decade, but then the clearance rate dropped to about 70%, where it’s stayed. In the two years following September 11th, around 3,000 seasoned detectives retired, while another 800 were shifted to the newly created counterterrorism unit, and precinct-level detectives who previously focused only on major felonies suddenly found themselves investigating newly prevalent crimes such as identity theft and lower-level offences like petty larceny. When the Cold Case Squad was first formed in 1996, it had about 50 detectives, which has since dropped to 8. The number of solved murders has also gone down, possibly due to understaffing.
So far, Brooklyn has 77 open murder investigations, the Bronx has 39, Queens has 26, Manhattan has 15 and Staten Island just two. Many of these are still unsolved. The top three precincts with the most open murders are East Flatbush, Crown Heights and East New York. Manhattan South’s homicide squad has 10 detectives to assist precincts in murder investigations, despite only 10 murders in its jurisdiction in 2013. Brooklyn North’s homicide squad, on the other hand, has 17 detectives, and 86 homicides in its jurisdiction. Roughly 86% of homicides involving a white victim have been solved, compared to 45% involving a black victim, and 56% involving a Hispanic victim.
According to Joseph Giacalone, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who retired last year as commanding officer of the Bronx Cold Case squad, Manhattan is treated differently from the outer boroughs because that’s where all of the money is. The average Manhattan homicide gets about double the amount of cops that you’d see in Brooklyn, partly due to heightened media attention. Ultimately, he says, the number of detectives assigned to a case during the critical first hours of an investigation has a big impact on whether or not that murder will be solved.
Citywide, the number of detectives on the NYPD has dropped from 7.151 in 2001 down to 5.137, and the number of homicide squad detectives has been cut in half to just 74. Murders in the city’s rougher neighborhoods are usually more difficult in solve, partially because of the “street code” against talking to police, particularly if they feel that the victim was a “bad guy”. Furthermore, what detectives coin the “CSI effect” has made killers smarter; they’re more conscious of leaving evidence, and are aware of things that will reduce the possibility of identification. Such reasons, however, matter little to the families of victims.
Maria Haymandou 