NY Daily News Admits It Got It All Wrong When Declaring Crime Increases Would Follow Stop-And-Frisk Decision

from the nice-to-see dept

When federal judge Shira Scheindlin ordered a number of stop-and-frisk reforms three years ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Chief Ray Kelly both predicted a drop in unconstitutional stops would result in a dramatic rise in criminal activity.

Bloomberg:

We, unlike many countries, want to keep all of our citizens safe, and keep the crime rate down and make sure that they get home and go to court and protect themselves -- unlike other countries in the world.

[...]

I wouldn't want to be responsible for a lot of people dying.

Kelly:

[N]o question about it —violent crime will go up…

The New York Daily News often provided a platform for NYPD officials who were quick to blame any increase in crime on the decline in stops.

“We’re struggling with homicides and shootings,” NYPD Chief of Department James O’Neill said Monday. “As we expect when warm weather comes, we see an increase in certain crimes.”

O’Neill laid out the grim numbers during a press conference at 1 Police Plaza, revealing a 19.5% spike in homicides during the first five months of the year. There were 135 murders through Sunday compared to 113 at the same time last year.

But…

Despite the increase in shootings and homicides, overall crime was down 6.6% through Sunday compared with the same period last year.

More NYPD opinions:

[S]ome officers believe the jump in killings can be linked to the NYPD’s new restrictions on stop-and-frisk.

“It’s because they changed the stop-and-frisk criteria,” one high-ranking police source told The News. “Before I would have said, ‘This guy right here by the way he’s adjusting his pants and moving around I would stop him.’ Now that’s not enough to stop a person so these guys get away with a gun.”

Tempered with reality:

While murders and shootings have increased, overall crime in the city is down by 10%, statistics show.

It's one thing to report on the NYPD's dissatisfaction with the new, court-ordered status quo. It's quite another to make it the publication's official stance. This is exactly what the New York Daily News did after Judge Scheindlin's order was handed down.

By imposing a monitor on the NYPD, she has rushed headlong into commandeering how the department polices the city with, she admitted, no concern about endangering life and limb.

Make no mistake — Scheindlin has put New York directly in harm’s way with a ruling that threatens to push the city back toward the ravages of lawlessness and bloodshed.

Most publications would simply let their bad judgment call recede into the past without comment, even after their assertions have been proven wrong. The NY Daily News should be commended for not only admitting its mistake, but publishing an entire editorial detailing just how wrong it was.

As many readers will know, the Daily News Editorial Board supported the NYPD’s strategy as essential to public safety. We also expressed fear that forcing the department to pull back could seriously harm public safety.

[...]

In other pieces, we predicted a rising body count from an increase in murders.

We are delighted to say that we were wrong.

The NYPD began scaling back stops under Kelly before Scheindlin’s decision and accelerated the trend under Commissioner Bill Bratton. As a result, the number of stops reported by cops fell 97% from a high of 685,700 in 2011 to 22,900 in 2015.

Not only did crime fail to rise, New York hit record lows.

The murder count stood at 536 in 2010 and at 352 last year — and seems sure to drop further this year. There were 1,471 shooting incidents in 2010 (1,773 victims). By 2015, shootings had dropped to 1,130 (1, 339 victims).

The NY Daily News should be praised for this editorial... but not too effusively. There's still quite a bit of hedging in its blown call admission. The Scheindlin decision somehow remains "flawed," despite its largest supposed flaw ("crime will rise!") being nonexistent. The editorial also hands the NYPD almost all of the credit for the continued decrease in crime, even though it was the NYPD itself that claimed that a transformed stop-and-frisk program would result in a new wave of criminal terror sweeping New York.

Regardless, there can be little doubt that the NYPD’s increasing reliance on so-called precision policing — knowing whom to target, when and where — has played a key role.

Maybe. Maybe not. The NY Daily News has no way of determining this. It admits that "explaining crime trends is extraordinarily difficult" while in the same breath (so to speak) hands credit to the NYPD for the continued drop in crime rates.

But it is something rarely seen: a publication that often seems to act as an unofficial mouthpiece for the NYPD admitting it didn't know what it was talking about when it parroted Mayor Bloomberg's and Chief Ray Kelly's hyperbole following the Scheindlin decision.

Filed Under: crime, nyc, stop and frisk
Companies: ny daily news

Internet Takes Smears Against Glenn Greenwald And Make It An Awesome Meme

from the #ggscandals dept

Ah, the days when you love "the internet." We already wrote about how some in the mainstream media -- including the NY Times and the NY Daily News -- had decided to pursue what were clearly smear pieces on reporter Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA surveillance story with leaks from Ed Snowden. The smear campaign involved digging way back into the past and dredging up a couple of completely minor things that weren't newsworthy when they happened and aren't newsworthy now. What was encouraging was reading the comments on the NYDN piece, which we won't give traffic to by linking from here, where most of the commenters condemned the paper and the reporter for the smear campaign.

However, "the internet" knows how to take something stupid and turn it into an awesome meme. Witness the #ggscandals hashtag on Twitter, in which people are coming up with a variety of fake "scandals" that involved Glenn Greenwald, highlighting just how ridiculously petty the claims being levied against Greenwald really are. The tweets are coming fast and furious. Here's just a random sample of tweets that came in on the tag over the course of less than a minute: In one simple move, a ton of people on the internet are showing the mainstream media that is trying to smear Greenwald what they think of them -- picking up on random tiny petty issues from his past and trying to make it out like it has any news value these days. Maybe, next time, instead of digging into Greenwald's past to try to make something out of nothing, reporters from the NY Times and the NY Daily News could, maybe, look into the NSA's surveillance efforts. You know, the story they didn't break and have been slow to report on.

Filed Under: ggscandals, glenn greenwald, internet memes, ny daily news, ny times, smear campaign
Companies: ny daily news, ny times

Reporter On The Roxanne Shante Story Chimes In... Sorta

from the well,-well dept

So, yesterday, we published our report noting that the NY Daily News story about Roxanne Shante supposedly earning a PhD from Cornell didn't appear to be fact checked at all, and in checking the facts, we found that almost none of them checked out. I had contacted the Daily News asking them to put me in touch with the reporter on the story, Walter Dawkins, but had not heard back until about an hour ago. Someone claiming to be Dawkins called me (and a call to his phone turned up voicemail claiming to be Dawkins), saying that he heard about me looking into the story from an unidentified "Dan from Cornell" (not from the Daily News, so apparently separate from my request) and wanted to see what I had found out and if there was any more beyond what I had written. So I told him that I had written everything I had found out, but I was more curious in finding out from him if he had done any fact checking at all on the story, and could he back up any of the things in the story that didn't check out.

From there, the call got... weird. First he just started listing off the already debunked sources of the Cornell Magazine (I'm guessing he meant the Cornell Chronicle) and that alum list which was obviously wrong, since it was from '91, well before Shante claimed to have attended Cornell. Then he said he heard about it on a "Hot97 interview." Then there was a pause, and he suddenly got quite agitated, saying he had to "get out of here" and then, "I know what you're doing! No recording, no writing stuff down. Everything I just said is OFF THE RECORD." Of course, that's not how it works. If you have something to tell a reporter "off the record," you establish that first. And I pointed out that surely he, as a professional reporter, knows that. I won't reprint his response, because I guess we can assume that everything after that point in the call was, technically, "off the record" but I can say that he never answered a single question and that most of the rest of the call had him insisting that he had nothing to say to me, followed by me pointing out that he was the one who called me, not the other way around. Eventually, the call ended with him hanging up on me and refusing to answer any of the questions I asked. He did, at one point, promise me an official statement later, but I'm not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, Shante also has been responding oddly, telling one blog that she was just "going to let it go," and posting on Twitter that "in 3days I will rise again everything is temporary today's gossip is tomorrow's deleted messages." Apparently, 'fessing up isn't in the cards.

But, of course, we need those big important newspapers with their professional reporters and fact checkers, or the blogs would run wild with lies, right?

Filed Under: fact checking, roxanne shante, walter dawkins
Companies: ny daily news