New Report: Crime and Welfare Enrollment One Year into the de Blasio Administration

NEW YORK, NY — Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Stephen D. Eide (@stephendeide) has authored a third report in a series that has been tracking the effects of the de Blasio administration’s policies among the lowest-income neighborhoods in the five boroughs and citywide. This report focuses on the administration’s policing and public assistance policies.

In recent years, crime has been generally trending downward in New York City. This trend has continued under the de Blasio administration, which uses a modified version of the Giuliani and Bloomberg approaches to policing. However, critics of the NYPD’s use of “broken windows” policing have recently become more vocal, demanding a change in strategy.

Eide looks at NYPD data on arrests for misdemeanor quality-of-life offenses, showing that the use of force in making low-level arrests is extremely rare and becoming steadily rarer. In order to analyze claims about racial bias, Eide compares police-initiated and victim-initiated arrests. He finds that there is no significant evidence that the NYPD show racial bias in performing misdemeanor arrests.

Key findings relating to crime in the report include:

• Crime is generally trending downward in New York City, though low-income neighborhoods continue to be more dangerous than their high-income counterparts.
• Police do not arrest minorities at a higher rate when acting on their own judgment than when they are responding to a specific victim complaint.

While de Blasio has generally continued in the path of Giuliani and Bloomberg with regard to policing, his administration has taken a much more progressive stance when it comes to welfare. The goal of the Human Resource Administration (HRA) is the same as it has been for years: to provide temporary help to individuals and families with social service and economic needs to assist them in reaching self-sufficiency. Under the de Blasio administration, however, the HRA is changing the way it goes about this goal by focusing more on access to education and training and easing up on enforcing the program’s rules and requirements.

Welfare enrollment has grown since the de Blasio administration enacted these changes, even while the local economy has improved, with significant growth focused in the low-wage industries likely to hire welfare recipients. Moving into the second year of de Blasio’s term, it remains to be seen if he will be as successful in addressing welfare dependency as he has been with continuing the downward trend in crime.

The key findings relating to welfare in the report include:

• New York City ended 2014 with more people on welfare than when it began. Following the HRA’s midyear announcement of major changes in the city’s public assistance program, enrollment grew by about 16,000 by the end of 2014.
• This increase has come during a time of relative prosperity for the local economy, which added over 90,000 jobs in 2014, many of which were in low-wage industries most likely to hire welfare recipients.

Click here to read the full report.

For more information on Stephen Eide, visit his bio here, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/eide.htm

To arrange an interview with Eide, please contact Michele Jacob at mjacob@manhattan-institute.org.