Another way to get crime stats to look good is to ignore crimes. Even from the article we are discussing here it sounds like there have been dozens of instances of assault and robbery that were ignored. Ignore enough and people stop wasting their time reporting crimes. Stats look great, the streets tell a different story.
Oops, didn’t notice the first link was for New York State. The CompStat link includes longer-term trends, though, which is what I was referring to.
Crime is down overall, and I suspect that if you controlled for the murder rate increase in all US cities over the past two years it might be flat or down in NYC as well.
Murder rate is arguably the most useful crime metric because it's the hardest one for politicians/police to game. Changes in enforcement can change trends for assaults and property crime, but you can't really hide bodies.
