Crime Myths and the New York Times

Fifteen minutes ago, I sent the following letter to the New York Times. You may notice that it weighs in at about double the paper’s 150-word limit. I usually try and stay within that limit, even though for political reasons, it is an exercise in futility. The Times hasn’t published any of my letters to the editor since 1997, its editors have no intention of publishing me in the future, and I haven’t felt like sending it letters using aliases over the past eight years. And since this letter could not be composed on the cheap, were it to make any worthwhile points, and I planned on publishing it myself from the get-go, I decided to do it right. To the Editor: In John Tierney’s April 16 column (“The Miracle That Wasn’t”), he accepts Steven D. Levitt’s theory, whereby legalized abortion caused the drop in crime in New York, as opposed to Malcolm Gladwell’s “tipping-point” (“epidemic”) theory. And yet, it is not clear how much of the reduction in violent crime in New York even occurred, and if it did, whether the real cause wasn’t an elaborate con game. Mr. Gladwell’s theory begs the question: What caused the “tipping point”? He has written that it was due to police being more aggressive in poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods. But in the crime-ridden neighborhoods I lived and worked in at the time, the police actually became more timid. Meanwhile, Mr. Levitt’s theory has repeatedly been disproved by writer Steve Sailer, who showed that the greatest crime reduction in New York was among men born before abortion was legalized there in 1970, that illegitimacy increased unabated immediately after 1970, and that teenagers born there after 1970 went on the greatest murder spree in U.S. history. And since the early-to-mid 1990s, the NYPD has been repeatedly exposed engaging in massive fraud in crime reporting by Newsday’s Leonard Levitt, myself, and several other local journalists. Following the tragic police shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999, local media organizations stopped reporting on crime statistics fraud for three years, as reporters and editors instead perpetrated the “racial profiling” hoax, until its target, Mayor Giuliani, left office in January, 2002. If there truly was a “tipping point,” it occurred when criminals came to believe – aided by journalists,’ politicians,’ and activists’ spreading of the racial profiling hoax – that the NYPD was being more aggressive. But the full truth regarding New York crime is unknown and perhaps unknowable.