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Safety and Justice

Tracing the steep decline in police enforcement actions in New York City

January 24, 2017

New York City’s falling crime rate has been accompanied by a dramatic reduction in arrests and other police enforcement activities.

That’s according to a new report from the Misdemeanor Justice Project at John Jay College. Mobility Partnership member Jeremy Travis is president of John Jay College and co-director of the Misdemeanor Justice Project. He wrote the introduction to the report, Trends in Admissions to the New York City Department of Correction, 1995-2015, and co-wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News citing the findings (A needed reprieve for young N.Y. men: Police enforcement actions are way, way down).

In the 20 years covered by the study, reported crime in New York fell by more than 60 percent. Over that same period, the total number of admissions to the New York City Department of Correction fell 46.9 percent. However, the drop in the rate (number per 100,000) at which black and Hispanic people were admitted to jail was even steeper—53.1 percent for black people and 61.7 percent for Hispanic people.

This study, explains Travis in a press release announcing the findings, “suggests the emergence of a criminal justice system in our City that is far less intrusive in the lives of New Yorkers, particularly for young men of color, without a parallel increase in crime.”

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