But Does the Times View This as Good News or Bad?

“Drop in New York Police Arrests Continues for a Second Week,” the Gray Lady reports:

For a second straight week, New York City police officers sharply cut back on their actions in the street, arresting less than half as many people and writing more than 90 percent fewer summonses than in the same period a year ago.

The slowdown built on a drastic drop in activity that began shortly after the murder of two uniformed patrol officers in Brooklyn on Dec. 20, and continued across all 77 precincts in the city.

For the seven days ending Sunday, officers made 2,401 arrests citywide, compared with 5,448 in the same week a year ago, a 56 percent decline. For criminal infractions, most precincts’ tallies for the week were close to zero. Citywide, there were 347 criminal summonses written, compared with 4,077 in the same week a year ago, according to Police Department statistics. Parking and traffic tickets also dropped more than 90 percent, the statistics showed.

Of course, this is the paper that made Fox Butterfield a semi-household name for his infamously clueless headlines, as Boston radio host Michael Graham noted a decade ago:

“The Butterfield Effect” is named in honor of ace New York Times crime reporter Fox Butterfield, the intrepid analyst responsible for such brilliantly headlined stories as “More Inmates, Despite Drop In Crime,” and “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction,” not to mention the poetic 1997 header, “Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.”

Mr. Butterfield is truly perplexed at what he calls the “paradox” of more criminals in prison coinciding with less crime in neighborhoods. An observation that might appear obvious to an 8th grader (crooks + jail = fewer crimes) is simply beyond his grasp. Butterfield of the Times is the poster boy for the greatest conundrum facing the American Left today: How do you explain to people who just don’t get it that the problem is they just don’t get it?

So I’m not sure if the Times — at least Pinch, MoDo, David Carr and their effete left-wing editorial board — considers this latest story to be good news or bad. The rest of New York may find out sooner rather than later though, as the Bad Old Days return to Manhattan much quicker than even us cynics on the right who had seen it all before anticipated in the fall 2013 once de Blasio was elected.

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Update:

“Half the people who live here now didn’t live here in 90s and have no idea how bad it was,” says @CommissBratton

— Nicolás Medina Mora (@MedinaMora) January 5, 2015

Insert Mencken “good and hard” quote here.