Mayor Bloomberg took the pulpit of a black church in Brooklyn on Sunday and declared that incarceration rates for city inmates nosedived 30% over the past decade.
There were 216,000 fewer people behind bars over the past 10 years than there would have been if rates had stayed as sky-high as they were in 2000, the mayor proclaimed.
“That’s 216,000 times that people stayed out of jail — and in their communities,” he told more than 100 worshipers at the First Baptist Church of Brownsville.
“And as we’ve cut the of number of people behind bars by 30%, in the rest of the country, the number has actually gone up — by 6%.”
The bottom line: Not only has the city enjoyed a sharper decline in crime than the rest of America, the miracle took place as incarceration tallies plunged, unlike in the rest of the country, where they’ve shot up, Bloomberg said.
Addressing the congregation in the high-crime neighborhood of Brownsville, the mayor won a smattering of cheers when he defended the city’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy — but said he understands why it faces community outrage.
Noting that young people have told him they’ve been angered after frisks in which cops used disrespectful language or unnecessary force, Bloomberg said, “I would be angry, too.”
But he quickly added, “I believe the practice needs to be mended, not ended, to ensure that stops are conducted appropriately, with as much courtesy as possible.”
To back up Bloomberg’s claim about plummeting incarceration rates, City Hall later said there were 134,200 city inmates in 2000 — meaning that there would have been 1.34 million over the next 10 years had rates remained the same.
Instead, in the period between 2001 and 2011, there were 1.12 million inmates, a difference of 216,511, or a 30% drop.
Nowhere is the decline reflected more dramatically than in Rikers Island: Its average 2011 daily population — 12,421 prisoners — was the lowest recorded census in 25 years, officials said.
rblau@nydailynews.com
