08/25/2023
From The New York Times news section:
Yale Students Got a Terrifying Message. From the Campus Police.
There was anger after the campus police union — which is renegotiating a contract — shared a safety flier with a picture of the Grim Reaper on it.
By Amelia Nierenberg
Amelia Nierenberg reported from New Haven, Conn.Aug. 25, 2023
Andre Fa’aoso, an incoming first-year student at Yale, has been in the United States for 12 days. He arrived from New Zealand on his own, three suitcases in tow.
As he pulled his luggage through downtown New Haven, Conn., a woman handed him a flier describing his new city as crime-ridden and dangerous. It listed alarming local crime statistics and instructed students to “remain on campus,” “avoid public transportation” and “stay off the streets after 8 p.m.” Illustrated with a picture of the Grim Reaper, the flier wished students an ominous “Good luck.”
But perhaps most jarring was the source of the flier, listed plainly in its text: the union that represents Yale’s own campus police.
In the days since the union distributed the “survival guide” leaflets, Yale administrators and police officials have been scrambling to calm first-year students and their parents.
Anthony Campbell, the chief of the Yale Police Department, said the leaflets wrongly painted New Haven as “a war zone.”
… The police union flier reported that “murders have doubled, burglaries are up 33 percent and motor vehicle thefts are up 56 percent,” in the first seven months of the year.
The numbers are accurate. But Mayor Justin Elicker called them cherry-picked and misleading. He noted that violent crime has decreased by 29.2 percent since 2020.
The Mayor is completely NOT cherrypicking by starting counting from the first year of the Racial Reckoning, rather than from, say, 2019, which is commonly used by non-tendentious people trying to estimate how much things have changed in this decade.
In general, very few Americans are yet equipped with the mental concept of the 2020s as a decade of higher crime than the 2010s. The media isn’t exactly enthusiastic about educating the public that 2020 was a turning point for crime, car crashes, and other forms of disorder. When it’s necessary to mention it, they jump immediately to the pandemic as the one and only cause.
Although homicides are up, the number of shootings has come down.
“Overall, over the past three years or so, crime is down,” he said, adding, “While the actual numbers may be accurate, they don’t present the full picture of what’s going on.”
The fliers strongly resemble pamphlets that public safety officers handed out to travelers arriving in New York City in 1975.
“Welcome to Fear City,” those fliers read, as unions representing public safety officers tried to fight layoffs.
… Mike Lawlor, a professor at the University of New Haven who is also a New Haven police commissioner, said that New Haven’s challenges mirror those of other American cities.
“If you’re trying to paint a picture of crime out of control, it’s not at all accurate,” he said, adding that the crime rate is “lower than it was 10 to 15 to 20 years ago, that’s for sure.”
More like crime is down from 30 years ago during the Crack Wars.
The CDC WONDER system tracks homicide deaths in New Haven County, of which New Haven is the seat. Homicide, the most accurately counted form of violence, is indeed up a lot in the current decade in New Haven.
In 2018, 26 homicides occurred in New Haven County and 31 in 2019. In this Decade of George Floyd, however, homicides have numbered 54 in 2020, 57, in 2021, and 47 in 2022. So, as in much of the country, New Haven County’s homicides during this decade’s “racial reckoning” are quite elevated by previous 21st century standards. The direction of these changes is extremely representative of national trends: up a little in 2019, up a historic amount in 2020, up a little more in 2021, down some in 2022, but still pretty bad by previous 21st century standards.
In contrast, the years 2000-2017 averaged about 34 homicides per year. Only two years exceeded 2022’s 47, with 2010 at 48 and 2011 at 52. (Note that I’m looking at homicides by county of occurrence for 2018-2022 but have only homicides by county of residence for 2000-2017. Most homicides involve homeboys, so there usually isn’t a big difference.)
My impression from my readers’ comments in the past is that Yale University has done a lot to expand the footprint of the safe Yale Bubble around the campus over the decades, much as the streets around the U. of Chicago campus tend to be much safer than the rest of the South Side of Chicago. Hence, undergrads who live on campus tend to be quite safe. Grad students looking to save on rent, however, can find themselves in concerning locations.
Parents and college students can be naive about how safe the streets around a campus are. For example, every so often some USC students from China get themselves murdered by South Central L.A. locals, which tends to come as a big surprise to parents in China. I have a theory that they get confused over the three colleges with famous film schools: NYU in Greenwich Village (very safe), UCLA in Westwood (quite safe), and USC in South-Central (not so much).
It seems pretty reasonable to inform students arriving at urban campuses to be on the lookout for criminals, considering all the other kinds of safetyism our culture inculcates in this century, but many NYT commenters are outraged about this Yale cop union negotiating tactic of informing students about the dangers surrounding them in New Haven: DON’T MENTION THE CRIME has recently become a matter of the highest etiquette for loyal Democrats.
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