Back in the good old days of March, as Newark closed out its first murder-free month in 44 years, the city put out an eight-page press release to “announce progress made during four years in public safety.”
The release included a series of “public safety highlights” – including overall crime down 21 percent, murders down 28 percent and shootings down 46 percent – and then went on to credit everything from cutting edge technology to good old-fashioned police work. It all made a young mayor, Cory Booker, and his grizzled police director, Garry McCarthy, sound pretty smart.
And, sure, a few days into April I got a phone call from an old friend in the ‘hood to tell me a rumor he had heard about the Newark Police dragging a body into Irvington just to keep the streak alive. Yet even skeptics had to grant that what Newark had achieved was significant. Booker did a round of appearances to celebrate murder-free March, and publications from USA Today to the Village Voice to Business Week took note.
Now it’s August, and Newark just had its 14th murder, double the number from August 2009. For the summer, there have been 35 murders – the kind of numbers that were common in the days when Newark’s annual homicide total routinely went into triple digits – and there hasn’t been a lot of bragging coming out of City Hall, or from around the corner at Newark Police headquarters on Green Street.

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