A Chicago-type Friday night in New York

Yesterday I asked, “Can you keep Chicago out of Naperville?” Now the question is, can you keep Chicago out of New York?

The July 7 New York Daily News reports:

A weekend of carnage in city as six killed and 21 injured in stabbings and shootings
Hot summer nights turn bloody in Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Only three suspects arrested

The carnage began around sundown Friday on a hot summer’s night, and continued until the sun rose Saturday morning.

Across barely eight hours, at least six New Yorkers were murdered and another 21 shot, stabbed or slashed across the city—with only three suspects arrested before the blood stopped flowing. [cont.]

- end of initial entry -

July 10

Alexis Zarkov writes:

New York City certainly had a bad weekend, with the Daily News now reporting seven murders. Crime is one of the reasons I left New York back in the 1970s. Today, thanks to aggressive policing, and an overall drop in crime throughout the U.S., the crime situation in NYC is much better. I wondered whether seven murders is just a chance fluctuation, so I did a little calculating. According to City-Data, New York suffers about 500 murders a year, but the well-known “weekend effect” boosts the murder rate so that 35 percent of all murders occur on weekends. That means NYC experiences 173 weekend murders or 1.66 murders per weekend. Seven seems like a very large fluctuation. We can see how large by using the law of rare events, which tells us that the chance of seven or more murders is 0.03 percent for a specific weekend. A little more calculating shows that there’s only a three percent chance of having one or more weekends with seven or more murders in a year. So yes New York had a very atypical and alarming surge in homicides. Seven is a gigantic weekend body count for a city with 500 homicides per year. Let’s hope this is not the beginning of a trend.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 07, 2012 11:37 PM | Send