The New York Times-20080125-Crimes in White Plains Decline to Record Lows
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Crimes in White Plains Decline to Record Lows
Serious crimes in this rapidly gentrifying city dropped to the lowest levels in more than four decades in 2007, according to statistics released on Thursday by officials here, and no murder has been recorded in White Plains since May 2006.
All told, 1,162 serious crimes were reported in White Plains in 2007, about 40 percent fewer than the 1,925 murders, rapes, robberies, larcenies, car thefts and assaults reported in 1965, the first year that the city began compiling crime statistics.
We were able to achieve this reduction while we've been in the midst of an unprecedented renaissance downtown, Mayor Joseph M. Delfino said in an interview. We have more residents and more influx of people today than ever before, but we also have less crime.
In 2000, White Plains began to redevelop its downtown, inviting developers to fill shuttered storefronts and vacant lots with the condominiums, office towers and retail stores that now dot its landscape. In the seven years since, the city has added more than 4,000 residents, with its population nearing 60,000 last year, according to census figures.
During those same seven years, the daytime population of workers and shoppers has more than quadrupled, with an estimated 250,000 people circulating in the streets on any given day, according to the mayor's office. Meanwhile, the White Plains Police Department has added 10 officers since 2000, for a total of 215, the mayor said.
As the city has grown, its serious-crime rate has declined, falling by almost 50 percent since 2000, according to the statistics collected by the city's Department of Public Safety.
One of the most precipitous declines was in the number of reported auto thefts: there were 34 last year, the lowest on record and just one-third of the number of auto thefts registered in 2000.
Robberies also reached a 42-year low last year, rapes reached a 12-year low and the number of assaults was one-quarter of what it was in 1965, according to the reporting statistics.
The city's public safety commissioner, Frank G. Straub, who came on the job in 2002, credits the reduction in crime to programs like Compstat -- a system that quickly tracks crimes and shifts resources to trouble spots -- and to a prison re-entry initiative that connects inmates about to be released from the county jail with mental health and substance abuse counselors, housing advocates and job placement programs.
Last year, 84 inmates participated in the re-entry program and of those, seven committed other crimes and were arrested after their release, Commissioner Straub said.
Through its community policing program, officers also have worked closely with the victims of domestic violence, and since 2003, there have been no homicides between intimate partners, he said.
There's no one-size-fits-all here, but a lot of different pieces that have come together to help us achieve this reduction, the commissioner said. I guess, in the end, it's about smarter policing, or about addressing the issues before they become an issue.
