Does the NYPD solve crimes? Who knows – the last published crime-solving data dates from 2022

At a press conference on Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams dismissed questions about documented police violence against New Yorkers who attended a protest last weekend and suggested that critics of the NYPD should actually thank the department.

“These organizations that write letters about how poorly they're doing, I would just love to write a letter one day about the agency that has reduced crime, taken 15,000 guns off our streets and achieved double-digit declines in murders and shootings and ours Subway system served,” Adams said. “How about a letter for that? Just a letter. A letter that says, 'Thank you, Detective, for risking your life, sealing the crime, or closing the crime.'”

The argument Adams appeared to be making is a familiar one: Critics of police misconduct and lack of or deficient police accountability mechanisms would do well to remember that police, whatever their shortcomings, keep the public safe by solving crimes and closes cases.

One way to measure how well the police are doing this job is to look at the number of specific crimes for which police have made arrests relative to the number of crimes reported. This is known as the clearance rate. An agency with a low clearance rate is not solving many of the crimes reported and is probably not doing much to deter people who might commit crimes from committing more.

It's a sufficiently important statistic that since 2017, the NYPD has been required by the city's administrative code to publish on its website the clearance rates for seven key index crimes: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, grand theft, and auto theft. The code requires the NYPD to publish the numbers quarterly, no later than 30 days after the end of each quarter.

But for more than a year, the NYPD has been ignoring this requirement. The most recently published clearance rates are from the last quarter of 2022, and the website's archives show it hasn't been updated in more than a year. The reports are also missing from the city's Government Publications Portal.

We asked the office of the NYPD's press team, DCPI, which, as was recently revealed, has grown to an impressive 86 employees, where we could find the missing five-quarters of the release data. DCPI wrote back and directed us to the page where this data is clearly missing. We wrote back and found that the page was indeed missing the data we requested, pointed out that the release of the data is required by law, and asked where we could find it. The 86 full-time employees of DCPI did not see fit to respond to that email. A further request, also addressed to Deputy Commissioner for Public Information Tarik Shepard himself and the Mayor's office, also did not receive a response by press time.

The most recent available clearance rates, from nearly a year and a half ago, show that the NYPD's ability to solve reported crimes through arrests varied considerably by type of crime: For every five murders, there were four arrests for murder, but only one arrest for every two reports of forcible rape, and only three arrests for every ten reports of other types of rape. Even worse was motor vehicle theft: for every nine reported car thefts, there was only one arrest.

But those numbers are old. How are they trending? Has the police made progress in pursuing car thieves? Do cops in the Bronx take rape less seriously than cops in Manhattan? The answer isn't found on the NYPD's website or in its well-staffed public information office.

Another way to get the NYPD's data would be through the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program, through which local police departments report a variety of data about crime and their response to it – although the NYPD's data is unlike other police departments of New York State such as the Buffalo Police Department, the Albany Police Department and the Canastota Village Police Department, which managed to submit their numbers to the government, are not available through the UCR portal. (An NYPD spokesman told the Marshall Project last year that it expected to be added to the federal collection “in the near future,” but gave no indication of when that might be.)

The missing numbers are frustrating, but not surprising to advocates for police accountability. “The NYPD has had a common practice of undermining transparency efforts through noncompliance or slow compliance,” said Jennvine Wong, senior staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society's Cop Accountability Project. “The department has generally not been very receptive to many transparency efforts.”

Alex Vitale, a sociology professor and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, said the missing reports speak to the department's handling of the public. “The NYPD has a public relations department of over 80 officers, but can never seem to meet basic public transparency requirements, comply with Freedom of Information Act requests, or release required statistics in a timely manner,” Vitale said. “It is a department that seems far more interested in managing the public interest than public accountability.”

While clearance rates are hardly the only measure of a police department's impact on public safety, Vitale said, “they help us understand some general trends in police response to crime,” given the particularly egregious handling of sexual assault cases by the police The NYPD, Vitale said – the department is currently the subject of a federal investigation – the missing numbers “raise the question of whether or not the failure to provide this information is politically motivated.”

Tiffany Caban, an Astoria City Council member and member of the Public Safety Committee, agreed that the missing reports are a problem. “The NYPD has proven itself to be a rogue agency that puts itself above all laws, rules, oversight and public accountability,” Caban told Hell Gate. “Considering that sometimes they don't even show up for hearings, it's not surprising that they fail to file very simple required reports. These reports are required to evaluate the impact and results of current policing practices. We desperately need a mayor to get a handle on this extremely disrespectful and irresponsible department.”