Mike Bloomberg’s “Safest Large City in America”

July 6, 2009

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s re-election campaign claims the FBI ranks New York as the safest large city in America.

That claim is false, and Bloomberg knows it.

The FBI doesn’t rank cities, and specifically states that it is misleading to use its statistics that way.

When Bloomberg made the same claim during his mayoral run in 2005, a complaint from the FBI led his campaign to yank the FBI reference from the campaign’s political ads, according to an FBI official.

“They modified their ad,” the official said. “But now they’re doing it again.”

While the mayor can rightfully claim, as his ads do, that “New York City has never been safer,” and that “crime is down nearly 30 per cent since he took office,” his placing the FBI’s imprimatur on his campaign wagon, in a graphic and voice-over, appears to go too far.

That’s because Mayor Mike’s “Safest City in America” claim relies on the FBI’s 2008 Preliminary Uniform Crime Report, which lists major felonies for each city by such categories as murder, rape, burglary and grand larceny.

But the report contains a “Please Note” section with cautionary language about rankings, saying, “Individuals using these tabulations are cautioned against drawing conclusions by making direct comparisons between cities.”

It also says, “The FBI discourages data users from ranking agencies and using the data as a measurement of law enforcement effectiveness.”

Nowhere in the UCR tabulations is there a ranking of cities.

In fact, back in 2004, the FBI cautioned that the crime index highlighted by the Bloomberg campaign “has not been a true indicator of the degree of criminality” because it gives the same weight to non-violent crimes as to violent ones.

For example, the non-violent crimes of larceny — theft — comprised nearly 60 per cent of all reported crime, and, as the FBI said then, “the sheer volume of those offenses overshadows more serious but less frequently committed offenses” such as rape, robbery or murder.

Instead of totaling all these crimes together, says the FBI official, a more accurate gauge of safety in any city is totaling purely violent crime, which the FBI does not do.

Reality, however, has not stopped the NYPD or New York’s last two mayors from touting New York as “the safest large city in America,” year after year.

In fact, that claim pre-dates Bloomberg and was first made by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Police sources say the genius whose fingerprints appear on the manipulated figures appears to be Michael Farrell, who served under Giuliani and who is currently the Deputy Police Commissioner for Strategic Initiatives.

Farrell did not return a phone call from this reporter. Attempts to reach the Bloomberg campaign and its director Bradley Tusk were unsuccessful.

This is not to say that New York has not drastically reduced both violent and non-violent crime since the beginning of the Giuliani years.

In fact, crime began falling under Kelly when he served for 16 months in his first term as police commissioner under Mayor David Dinkins, although not at the steep rates of Kelly’s three successors appointed by Giuliani: William Bratton, Howard Safir, and Bernard Kerik.