While browsing through different sites, I randomly cam across the ominous-sounding disaster center website. There is a fair amount of data that could be analyzed there, but my attention was caught by an entry stating that they had just updated the “1965 to 2012 State Crime Pages”. From there, I chose the completely biased option of analyzing crime rates in my hometown (NYC) from 1965 – 2012.

Number of crimes per 100,000 habitants in NYC during 1965 to 2012.

You will notice that I have also added the periods during which various NYC mayors were in office, where I color-coded each period by the party ideologies of each mayor. It’s  already a well-known anecdote, but it is remarkable to see the drop-off in crime rate after Giuliani took office, and how Bloomberg was able to maintain that.

However, it does make us consider the slightly deeper question of whether the crime rate in NYC has converged to a minimum, and whether human nature would ever be capable of reducing that to zero? There’s an interesting prediction problem…