After 43 Days, Newark's Respite Is Over.

(photo: The New York Times)

Newark has been trying to drive down its homicide toll, with Mayor Cory Booker running around in the last days of 2007 trying to importune his cops to do something to stanch the bloodshed in Brick City (crime reduction was one of the issues on which he’d run for office). Newark, a city of 280,000 people, closed out the year with 99 murders.

The city went through a remarkable stretch — which eventually reached 43 days — where it didn’t see a single homicide.

But about 9 p.m. Tuesday, [homicide detective’s] BlackBerrys buzzed with a still-familiar bulletin: Another young man had been gunned down on the street.

Tearful relatives of the man, 20-year-old Andre Thomas, stood behind police tape near a bodega in the South Ward, talking about how he had been enrolled in college classes and was helping raise his girlfriend’s children. Police officials said that Mr. Thomas had been arrested 13 times, including an arrest on the street where he died, and said that his was a “targeted” killing, in which a gunman in a ski mask chased him down a street and shot him in front of the bodega.

During the stretch of relative tranquility, police said shootings and rapes were down, but assaults were up.

This prompted some disagreements over what caused the lull. Booker said it was due to ” a fugitive apprehension project, a unified narcotics squad, a hot line for tips, more police officers on the street and the renewed embrace of New York City’s Compstat system.”

Andrew Karmen, a sociologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, isn’t so sure.

The drop in Newark homicides, he said, might be too rapid to be explained by a change in social conditions or a demographic shift. Looking at historical data about the city’s homicide rate, Dr. Karmen said that there had been reductions in the past, especially beginning in 1997, when Compstat, a crime-tracking technique pioneered in New York City and credited with crime reductions there, was introduced. But the murder rates had crept back up.

“Initial gains are hard to sustain,” Dr. Karmen said, pointing to crime increases in Philadelphia and Baltimore after the introduction of what has come to be known as the New York City model in those cities. Efforts by law enforcement — especially crackdowns on so-called quality of life infractions — had to be met with corresponding social programs, like providing after-school and summer jobs, and drug treatment programs, he said, adding: “It’s hard to maintain the momentum.”

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Gene "G.D." Demby is the founder and editor of PostBourgie. In his day job, he blogs and reports on race and ethnicity for NPR's Code Switch team.
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