The Bronx is a borough of New York City that has had its share of crime over the years. But how has the crime rate changed since its inception? According to NYPD crime figures, 8,395 incidents were reported in the Bronx this year, compared to 8,071 at the same time last year, representing an increase of 4%. While this number is concerning, it is important to note that the number of shootings has increased in almost every district of the Bronx, except for the 50th district of Riverdale. Every borough in the Bronx has experienced an increase in the number of shooting victims.
Anthony Rivieccio, a resident of Bedford Park and founder of the Bronx Northwest Democrats, believes that Adams is best suited to fighting crime. Passengers were afraid of crime, tired of long waits to get to trains, which were shortened to save money, and were upset about the general malfunction of the system. The Bronx has a high birth rate compared to the rest of New York, and much of its recent population growth is due to immigration. At the time, Kelly was a firm believer in community policing, and helped drive the decline in New York City by instituting the Safe Streets, Safe City program, which put thousands more police officers on the streets.
This allowed them to be visible and interact with local communities. Fear of crime helped elect conservative politicians for decades, such as Richard Nixon in 1968 with his platform “Law and Order” (overshadowing the Vietnam War as a campaign issue); George H. W. Bush in 1988; and Rudy Giuliani and Howard Safir in 1993. The percentage of Bronx adults currently participating in the labor force is 59.5%, which is not drastically lower than the national rate of 63.8 percent. The president of the Citizen Crimes Commission, Thomas Reppetto, said that the shortage of police officers was making it difficult to “maintain law and order on the streets.” The rates of most crimes, including all categories of violent crime, fluctuated from their peak recorded in his first year, 1990, during the last 36 months of his four-year term. As more and more people come to New York City looking for affordable housing, they will need a place to go - and that place is The Bronx.
During the 1990s, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) adopted CompStat, police surveillance with broken windows, and other strategies in a major effort to reduce crime. The Bronx has seen a dramatic decrease in crime since then - so much so that two real estate developers had to hire set designers to make their new luxury property look authentically from “the Bronx” by sculpting cars riddled with bullets and setting fire to garbage cans. By the mid-1970s, the county's homicide rate had nearly tripled in just five years - higher than that recorded in all of New York City today. While there is still work to be done to reduce crime rates further in The Bronx, it is clear that significant progress has been made since its founding.
