New York City celebrates day without violent crime

I hate to just bust out some stats here, but:

The average murder rate in the US is roughly 5.0 per 100,000 and falling [1]. NYC's population fluctuates between its 8.2 million residents in the evenings and closer to 10.5 million people during the day (due to commuters), but let's go with a conservative 8.5M for this calculation. In that case, we should expect 425 murders in a city this size. At 366 murders in 2012 by the end of November, we're on track to beating that average.

Murders are horrible, and I don't want to in any way say that a nonzero murder rate is good, but I actually do think that NYC's massive decrease in homicide over the last two decades is a cause for celebration. I didn't live here in the late 90s, but I have friends who did who would never have set foot in large swaths of Manhattan because they were simply too unsafe. These same people will happily go to a house party in Bed Stuy.

Are we done? No. Is this cause to celebrate? I think so. Celebrating major milestones on the road to improvement is normal and healthy. The only trick is not to conflate that celebration with you being "done." I don't think we're doing that.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

Yup, when the massive snow storm hit Baltimore 2 years ago their murder rate for that month was a historic low. As soon as the snow was cleared the crime rate returned to normal.

I grew up in NYC during the high-crime Lindsay/Koch years. I would apply some skepticism to crime statistics derived from police reports. While I don't doubt that violent crime is way down, it's also true that people tend not to bother to report many crimes, because the police don't seem to be interested. While I'm sure that most murders would end up in the official statistics, I know that plenty of assaults, etc. are just never reported.