Murder rate up slightly in New York City

NEW YORK – When city officials brag about how crime has declined in America’s largest city, the temper of one Brooklyn mother rises.

“I don’t know where they’re living,” Diane Jordan says. “Not here.”

Ten months ago, her 17-year-old daughter, Chantel Bailey, was shot twice in the chest as an innocent bystander to a meaningless dance-floor dispute. Three other teens and a bouncer were wounded. None knew their assailants.

The tragedy dramatizes a fact that has put some tarnish on the city’s sterling crime-fighting reputation: Murders are on pace to creep up this year.

The increase, though slight, would be only the third in the last 12 years. A handful of neighborhoods have been especially hard hit, including one in Queens with an increase of more than 100 percent.

Police officials and experts – who view homicide as the most reliable and telling of the major crime statistics – insist there is no cause for alarm.

“Overall, everyone should breathe a sigh of relief,” said Eli Silverman, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “If anything, the (police) department is fighting its own success.”

Even with a rise in murders, the rate should still end up below 600 for the second straight year – a far cry from the record 2,245 homicides recorded in 1990. In 2002, the city had 584 homicides; there were 567 through Dec. 14 this year, the latest count available.

Overall serious crime – including assaults, robberies and rape – is down 6 percent this year. Sharp declines over the past decade have outpaced other urban areas, and made New York the safest it has been since the 1960s.

At a recent news conference, Mayor Michael Bloomberg hailed the record on crime as “a major factor in why the Big Apple is coming back.” The NYPD’s Web boasts that the department is “the nation’s leading crime fighter.”

But critics contend crime-statistic politics glosses over the rise in violence in poor neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and elsewhere.