Slay stats a dead end

Murder is not a numbers game

Murder isn’t baseball. So keeping box scores seems a bit ridiculous. Every day I read about an increase in murders and shootings as if we were following the Mets mid-season decline instead of the accomplishments of the greatest police force on Earth.

There are so many reasons people commit murder that you have to factor in the economy, gang activity, the street drug of choice, weather, personal relationships and, yes, NYPD policies. But to say that the city is reverting to the “bad old days” of the late-1980s or early 1990s because we have 22 more murders in the first five months of this year compared to the same period in 2014 — a record low year for murders — is preposterous.

It’s unfair to constantly compare last year’s stats to this year’s. There will be fluctuations in human behavior all the time, no matter who sits in City Hall or One Police Plaza.

In 1998, when Rudy Giuliani ruled with city with an iron fist, there were 633 murders, according to NYPD stats. The next year there were 671. But I don’t remember the front pages screaming that those 40 extra homicides meant we were reverting back to the bad old days of 1993 when we had 1,946 murders under Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

In 2002, in Mike Bloomberg’s first of 12 years as mayor and with Kelly (below left) back as police commissioner, there were 587 murders. The next year, 597. Then in 2004, there was a decrease, to 570. Great. But in 2006, 596 people were killed, 26 more bodies on the streets of New York City.

Did anyone claim we were hurtling back to Kelly’s first stint as commissioner in 1992-94? No. Because that would have been unfair. The mayor and the city backed Kelly and watched him sing “Auld Lang Syne” in 2007 to 496 murders. A great number. But remember that when Bill Bratton first took over One Police Plaza Jan. 1, 1994, inheriting a city with 1,946 murders, he brought it down to 1,561 in the first year. By the end of 1996, Bratton’s “broken windows” and CompStat policies drove murders down to 983.

And Bratton got fired by Giuliani for winding up on the cover of Time.

In 2008, with Kelly as NYPD commissioner, the number of murders rose by 28 corpses from the year before, to 523. In 2009, it dropped to 471. And rose again in 2010 to 536, an increase of 63 homicides.

That’s a lot of funerals. It also showed that there were just 53 fewer bodies on the street than when Bloomberg-Kelly took office eight years earlier. Still with murder up more than 10%, Bloomberg was able to change the term limits law and buy a third term for Kelly and himself.

The pair abused the tactic of stop, question and frisk, alienating the good people in our highest-crime precincts and broad-jumping the Fourth Amendment to drive down murders to 419 in 2012 and 335 in 2013.

Yes, we had the lowest murder rate in history, but the city had once again become polarized by race and class.

When Bill de Blasio took office as mayor and picked Bratton (below right) for a second tour as police commissioner, stop, question and frisk was reduced by 90%. Crime stats roller-coastered through a tumultuous year in 2014 that was marked by the police chokehold killing of Eric Garner.

But when the ball dropped Dec. 31 on the Times Square that Bratton helped transform from a cesspool to a tourist mecca in his first term as commissioner, murders were at a record low of 333.

By the end of May 2015, there were 22 more murders, for a total of 135, than in the first five months of last year. Just like there had been murder spikes in four of the 12 Bloomberg-Kelly years. Just as there was a rise in shootings in six Bloomberg-Kelly years.

So when fear mongers warn of a return to the “bad old days” are they referring to the 1,946 murders of 1993? Or the 597 of 2003? Or the 596 of 2006? Or the 515 of 2011? Or the 419 of 2012?

C’mon, these gotcha numbers games are silly. If you drive murders to a record low of 2014’s 333 it takes just 32 additional homicides in a city of 8.5 million to say murder is up 10%. If 60-plus extra bodies fall — like they did in 2010 — it’s up 20%.

But real New Yorkers who live and work and raise kids here in the five boroughs know that this city is safer than ever. And a lot fairer.