Mayor's Office: NYC Jail Population Down 18 Percent Since De Blasio Started
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday that the New York City jail population has dropped 18 percent since he took office.
The Mayor's office said the decline outpaced that of any three-year period since 2001.
The average daily population in the city's jails dropped from 11,478 in December 2013 – just before the mayor took office – to an average of 9,362 this month, the Mayor's office said.
In just the last year, the jail population has dropped 6 percent from 9,981 in March of last year, the Mayor's office said.
The Mayor's office credited policies that reduced the number of people who go to jail and how long they say, while still efforting to protect public safety.
"The number of people incarcerated in the U.S. did not fall in the last year, and our nation's incarcerated population remains the largest in the world," Mayor de Blasio said in a news release. "But New York City has a different story to tell – we are making every effort to ensure that people who do not need to be behind bars are not, all while keeping crime at historic lows."
The Mayor's office said 2016 was also the safest year in the history of the CompStat crime tracking program, with homicides down 5 percent, shootings down 12 percent, and burglaries down 15 percent from the year before.
The Mayor's office further said that while jail and prison populations grew 11 percent nationally between 1996 and 2013, the New York City jail population dropped by 39 percent.
New York City detains 167 people per 100,000 in jail – lower than Los Angeles at 263 per 100,000 and Chicago with 281 per 100,000, the Mayor's office said. All of the nation's three largest cities fall in belwo the national average of 341 per 100,000.
The Mayor's office further said New York City leads the nation in the number of defendants who are kept out of jail while their criminal cases are pending.
Meanwhile, enforcement resources have meant crackdowns on "serious, violent crime," the Mayor's office said. In 2015, arrests for murder were up 16 percent and gun arrests were up 10.5 percent.
