Correction Connection: New York City crime rate

You'd expect the New York Times to not republish such a blatant error as that which they printed Friday. Apparently, however, they got it from a Wikipedia entry - which itself did not cite any source.

The reason the Wikipedia article doesn't cite a source is that whoever added this claim to the article was full of bullshit. They pulled it out of their ass, and the most respected major paper in America fell for it.

The Times article was about right-wing former NYPD commish Howard Safir - who recently backed his SUV into a pregnant woman, started a shouting match, and drove away. The piece claimed that by 1998, Safir had lowered the city's homicide rate to its lowest since 1962.

Seriously. The New York Times really said that.

The Times and Wikipedia actually claimed New York's homicide rate in 1998 was as low as it was in 1962?

The alleged drop in violent crime nationally in the '90s is already known to be a hoax. This fraud was created by the government and talk radio to make it look like the growth of the prison state was successful at reducing crime.

But people fell for it, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The punditocracy claimed there was less crime after the prison boom of the '90s than before, and everyone lapped up this lie - regardless of their own experiences.

Of course, this hoax didn't ease the Far Right's "superpredator" fantasy that they always use to justify expanding the prison state and the failed War on Drugs even more.