A crime against math: De Blasio plays fast and loose with statistics regarding police and the courts

Mayor de Blasio is very relieved that crime in the city went down in August compared to last summer. He highlighted the stats Tuesday during his daily briefing on COVID and Ida and any other calamities we’re facing. In his own words: “In the month of August 2021, compared to August 2020 — so, the month-to-month comparison, shootings down almost 31%; shooting victims, almost 30%; and murder down almost 9%.”

It all sounds positive, and it is until the very noisy, dangerous and bloody mayhem of 2020 is put in perspective. Had de Blasio and NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea used the pre-COVID baseline of 2019 and the department’s own CompStat figures, August 2019 to August 2021 shootings were up 84%, and August 2019 to August 2021, murder increased 47%, nothing to celebrate and much to mourn.

But is it fair to use the pre-COVID state of the city to paint a dreary portrait of crime levels remaining stubbornly high? De Blasio certainty thinks so, as in the same presentation Tuesday, when again and again he attacked the state court system for not processing criminal cases fast enough, he used not his own standard of 2020, but 2019.

The mayor said about the courts, “we want to start comparing against 2019, not against 2020.” Oh?

Marcos Soler, head of de Blasio’s Office of Criminal Justice, said, “as the mayor has a stressed, year to date, in 2019, we have 459 trial verdicts, this year we have only had 29 as of the month of July.” That’s terrible, but they don’t use last summer’s COVID time as a benchmark, because then there were zero trials going on. A comparison to 2020, like the mayor did with crime numbers, would show the courts are, relatively speaking, humming along.

Having it both ways, 2019 is the mayor’s baseline for crime and punishment regarding the courts, but 2020 is the one right way to evaluate police statistics. Pay no attention to anything before COVID unless it happens to make your very weak case stronger.