Thread by @DrRJKavanagh

Misleading reporting from @nytimes is nothing new, but this takes the cake.

Murders in NYC have not "doubled overnight," or this year compared to last year or last year to the year before.

This isn't even an accurate quote from the article, which says NYPD "caseloads doubled."

In fact homicides in New York City are down in 2021 compared to 2020, by the NYPD's own statistics.

This includes in the Bronx, where they are down by 29%.
www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/do…

Yes homicides increased in 2020, compared to 2019. They did not double, nowhere near it. That's not surprising. We were in the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic.

A more relevant statistic: over the last 28 years, homicides in the Bronx have decreased 80%.

Perhaps even more shocking is the article's unsubstantiated and false claim that the percentage of murders solved by the police has plunged in the last two years.

The article says that until 2020 the NYPD was solving 90% of murders. That's just not true. nytimes.com/2021/11/26/nyr…

The NYPD's clearance rate for homicides in the last decade always hovered around 60%. In some years it was as low as 50%.

In 2019, by @nytimes own reporting, it was approximately 65%. nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opi…

If the clearance rate for homicides in 2020, and now in 2021, is around 60 or 62% (as this new article states) then that is at the upper end of the clearance rate for previous years, again despite the city being in the middle of a global pandemic.

If all of this isn't enough, the article adds in another completely unsupported claim - a police lieutenant's suggestion that witnesses are reluctant to speak to cops because of new open discovery laws.

I mean @nytimes acting as police stenographers is nothing new, but this article grabs statistics out of thin air, easily disprovable by NYPD's own data. I doubt there will be a response.