American Press has with notable and salutary exceptions done poor job studying violent crime, a grave problem as USA is the most violent by far in developed western world. Let's use NYC's homicide rate as benchmark. It has gone up sharply, by #thread

2, 40 percent. Will finish with 440 homicides. But not remotelyas dire as other cities. Baltimore in per capita terms has a rate of killing equivalent to 4000 deaths in NYC, or roughly twice as much as our all time high. DC's rate equivalent to 2,500 in NYC. Chicago's rate

3. equivalent to 1600. Detroit is at about 3,600 in NYC terms. And St. Louis is a killing field, with # of homicides equivalent to 6,400 in NYC, or three times our worst ever (1990). None of this is to argue police brutality and misbehavior is not a serious problem. It is. Nor is

4. it to argue for carceral solution or a militarized police force. There are cities and groups that have devoted much thought to this, not the least @MetroIAF , the Saul Alinsky based organizing group that has done much work around crime. But it merits very careful street level

5. reporting, and not subject to be confinedto press cop shacks or one off stories. That is to do a great disservice to many thousands of young men (primarily) who are killing and dying on our streets. Violence at the level of many of our cities makes civic life impossible. When

6. I was a tenant organizer in East Flatbush in the early 1980s, it was very difficult to get homeowners and tenants even to walk to a nearby church for a meeting. That has greatly improved in the past 20 years. But ask yourself as a New Yorker: Would you let your teenager roam

7. the city if we had 4,000 homicides? Would your relationship to the city itself? To ask is to answer ... And we need to pay attention