17th Dec 2002
New York City, Lowest Crime Rate Among Big U.S. Cities
I feel it is part of my duty as a WNYC/NPR junkie to blog news I hear on the radio that may go unreported otherwise in the blogosphere. Part of the trick is that WNYC’s local news department is so good at local scoops that I often have trouble validating them online elsewhere until the rest of the pack catches up. Case in point: while lots of news sources are reporting (as of 11:15am EST today) the release of the FBI’s latest 6-month national crime trends report, no one else yet has picked up WNYC’s point that New York City has the lowest crime rate among the biggest 25 cities in the nation.
I tried to find the same point in the FBI’s report, but it’s not teased out clearly. Someone, either at WNYC or their source, must have gone thru the FBI’s list of some 200 cities and identified the biggest 25 and done the math themselves, which I didn’t take time to do. I’m just assuming that they got it right, in which case you’ll probably soon see it picked up elsewhere in the NY media. Till then, you saw it here first.
Go NYC, you rock!
Also, a bonus dividend of looking into this: I found the FBI’s Page 2, a web news page with its own slogan, “Beyond the headlines.” If I didn’t know better, I’d say it looks like the FBI’s blog.
UPDATE:
Cool. I scooped the mayor, who, in the afternoon, told a press conference:
?New York City now ranks 197 out of the 216 cities with at least 100,000 residents. To put that in context, we?re right between Provo, Utah, and Rancho Cucomonga, California. I don?t mean to disparage those towns; their crime rate is impressive as well. But when you want to be safe, you come to New York City.”
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