By Everyman Jones

Just before New Year’s Eve, Newark officials released figures showing that Newark had recorded 50 homicide victims in 2022, a year-over-year decrease of 15% and the lowest number of homicides in Newark since 1961. The figure continued a remarkable trend, which had seen homicides in Newark reduced by more than half since 2013. The figures presented by city officials would also show a 6% decrease in the overall violent crime rate. In short, by every available metric, Newark is objectively safer today than it has been in living historical memory. Yet, in the popular imagination, Newark remains a crime-ridden hellscape. 

Subjective perceptions of crime that are clearly contradicted by data are not endemic to Newark. A Pew Research Center survey found that before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a majority of Americans who planned to vote said “crime has gotten worse in this country since 2008,” a period during which official government crime statistics showed that “violent crime and property crime rates fell 19% and 23%. And yet, the way those subjective perceptions permeate through civic life in Newark feels distinctive, a Leviathan intent on sucking out the oxygen from any conversation about Newark that does not center a presumptive hellish vision of crime and Newark. 

Comments under a Facebook post for a TAPIntoNewark article entitled “For the First Time, A Single Family House in Newark Sells For $1M” are representative of the above-described phenomena. The article, concerning the purchase of a home in the Forest Hills neighborhood by a well-known boxing announcer, had no rational relationship to crime or public safety, but, because the article related to Newark, the commenters believed it did:

Enjoy your crime!

M. Licht, February 26, 2023, 7:19 AM

Then he went outside his new house and got robbed

N. Adam, February 26, 2023, 2:43 AM

Nice house but to spend so much on a house to be living in a Bad crime area…Hopefully it came with a free alarm system…Best wishes and luck to the buyer 

D. Adams, February 26, 2023 10:16 AM

People who invest in Newark are idealistic and know little about the politics. The schools are just a holding pen for hoodlums.

P. Marino, February 25, 2023 11:47 AM

Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s “The Condemnation of Blackness” conducted a historical accounting of the historical roots of modern discourse on race and crime and why “[i]n all manners of conversations about race—from debates about parenting to education to urban life—[B]lack crime statistics are ubiquitous.”Muhammad explains that those historical roots began with the 1890 census, the first census to tabulate raw data for the generation of African Americans born after slavery. He states, “[w]ith the publication of the 1890 census, prison statistics for the first time became the basis of a national discussion about blacks as a distinct and dangerous criminal population.” After the concept of Black biological inferiority, which served to underpin antebellum slavery, lost its scientific salience, the concept of Black cultural inferiority would come into prominence during Reconstruction and the dawn of the Jim Crow, undergirded by black crime statistics. As he explains, “[f]rom this moment forward, notions about [B]lacks as criminals materialized in national debates about the fundamental racial and cultural differences between African Americans and native-born whites and European immigrants.”

If the underlying premise of Muhammad’s thesis is true, one is left with the pessimistic notion that, for as long as Newark remains a plurality-Black city, Newark will be presumed to be “dangerous,” and that no objective metric will ever result in a Newark being deemed “safe,” separate from the wholesale absence of its Black residents. However, that conclusion seems too pat to sit comfortably with; too discomforting. Over the course of the next two editions of The Newarker, therefore, I will look more closely at Muhammad’s thesis, the historical and sociological roots of how Newark came to be inescapably linked to crime, and how Newark officials have addressed and are addressing the reality and perception of crime in the city.

Everyman Jones is just a regular guy in Newark, just like you and me.

_{Featured photo by Pexels}