Trust and the Police

In film, fiction and the public fancy, New York City suffers an abysmal reputation as a nest of crime. A report issued last week by the U.S. Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration shows that this unsavory reputation is not entirely deserved. Among the five largest U.S. cities, New York ranked last on a per-capita basis in the number of rape, assault or robbery victims.

In a door-to-door survey that was conducted early last year, 22,000 residents in each of the five cities were asked if during 1972 they had been robbed, raped or assaulted. Only 36 out of 1,000 said that they had been the victims of such crimes in New York, compared with 53 in Los Angeles, 56 in Chicago, 63 in Philadelphia and 68 in Detroit. Not only were individuals generally safer in New York, but they were more secure from other crimes: burglary, auto theft and larceny.

None of the five police departments could ignore the survey's soberest finding: most crimes are never reported. In more than half the New York crimes, the victims failed to notify the police. For every five crimes committed in Philadelphia, the survey found, only one was reported. The two most common reasons given for this silence were a belief that the case could not be solved for lack of proof, and a resigned feeling that the incident was not important enough to merit the attention of the police. The job before big-city police departments is plain enough: to convince the public that reporting crimes is necessary and worthwhile--and that one of the policeman's responsibilities is to establish proof.

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