Today I was surfing a bit around the internet and was visiting the website of the city of New York. Not for any particular reason, we went to the United States a few years ago, including New York, and I wanted to check out the site to see what was on offer.
Eventually I came to the site of the New York Police Department (NYPD) through the regular site and there my eye fell on the crime statistics in New York. I remembered looking at it years ago. It is bizarre how open and transparent the figures are presented. In itself I think it's a very good thing, it's not like that. But in the Netherlands, the government is not so open about it. You can download the statistics in PDF or Excel format, then you can also edit them yourself to view averages etc.
All files are downloadable on the NYPD site.
I downloaded and looked at the excel sheet of the crime statistics for the whole city. The statistics of various topics can be viewed from a month ago, year ago or years ago. What strikes me is a reasonable decline in offenses over the years and a bit of a stabilization over time. But still, compared to the Netherlands, extremely high figures. But of course it should also be mentioned that New York is a huge city compared to the big cities here.
Compared to this week last year there are 7 ?!?! committed fewer murders, last year there were 17 !!, for us that is unimaginable. Over the entire year, there have been 2 more murders committed in 2021 than last year. But if you look at the total number in 2020 (468) and the number of murders in 1990 (2262), it has fallen enormously over the years. This has of course everything to do with the fight against crime by the previous mayor Rudy Giuliani, he has (partly) ensured that New York has become much safer.
In addition to all the figures on crime, you can also view the figures on traffic accidents, etc., which are again subdivided into all kinds of topics. In addition, there is also a section dashboards and reports, here you can find all kinds of reports with different topics. I found the homicide reports to be bizarre. This contains all kinds of details about the nature of the murder, which month, which neighborhood, age of the victim and perpetrator, race of both, age, etc. But also the relationship between victim and perpetrator. Really a lot of details that I wonder is is anyone even reading this online (yes, so I do too), but also what the details add for the public.
The system they use (compstat) is used in several cities in the united states, maybe I'll compare them again :) ...
But my meaning with this post is that the information flow online is inexhaustible and there is so much data available, of which this data is a fairly extreme example in my opinion, don't you think?
Have a great evening,
Peter