With only five days left in office, outgoing mayor mike Bloomberg is in full legacy-burnishing mode. Mr. Bloomberg is spending the weekend talking about crime, and his record in reducing it, Capital New york reports. Mr. Bloomberg visited Thursday morning a Neighborhood Opportunity Network Center in South Jamaica, Queens, and attending his final police graduation ceremony on Friday.

To drive home the point that Bloomberg’s crime-fighting legacy is something worth noting, his deputy mayor for communications, Howard Wolfson, sent out a memo today to “interested parties” inside and outside the administration entitled “T-Minus 5” to demonstrate that crime in New York City is at “record lows.”

“New York City has fewer major felony crimes per 100,000 residents than any of the nation’s top 25 largest cities,” Wolfson writes. “Total crime is down 32% compared to 2001, despite the added demand of counterterrorism, having fewer officers in the ranks, and adding 300,000 more people to the city’s population. New York is”on pace to have a record low number of murders in 2013 following a record low established in 2012. Murder is down 49% compared to 2001.”

“During the last twelve years, the United States also saw crime declines, but it was achieved by locking more people up,” Wolfson wrote. “But New York City didn’t reduce crime by locking more people up: in fact the City actually put fewer and fewer of its citizens behind bars as crime fell to record lows.”

Wolfson attributed all of this to several tactics, like felony drug courts, alternatives to incarceration, better probation programs, and the Young Men’s Initiative, which focused on reducing crime among young black and Latino men.

He also noted the city hasn’t suffered another terrorist attack since September 11.

(Jacob Kornbluh – YWN)