New York City is apparently a place where a black man can be choked to death with impunity for selling loose cigarettes, but white-collar criminals are bailed out by feds and gifted with bonuses for bringing down the nation’s economy. On the day of the non-indictment in the Eric Garner homicide, the New York Times Magazine published a piece by Chip Brown which examines the virtues of Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance Jr.’s data-rich approach to crime reduction. The thing is, the new system doesn’t move us beyond the crudity of the dubious Broken Windows Theory, only serving as a complement to it, and may actually exacerbate inequity and further profiling. Striving for fewer violent attacks is great, though that should include the kind Garner suffered. Numbers, ultimately, are only as good as the system they feed. An excerpt:

“C.S.U. ‘violence timelines’ reveal patterns around certain housing developments and neighborhoods, including shooting incidents that didn’t generate a police report but that prosecutors were able to substantiate through debriefings or reports on social media. Probably the most comprehensive database is the Crime Prevention System, which targets violent crimes and gathers on one spreadsheet the sort of information that used to be scattered on legal pads or parked in some retired detective’s head — details about a defendant, including nicknames, which can be linked to additional information: friends, tattoos, telltale scars, Facebook entries, geo-coded street addresses, debriefing tips, excerpts from jailhouse phone calls.

‘It’s the ‘Moneyball’ approach to crime,’ [Vance’s executive assistant D.A. Chauncey] Parker told me. ‘The tool is data; the benefit, public safety and justice — whom are we going to put in jail? If you have 10 guys dealing drugs, which one do you focus on? The assistant district attorneys know the rap sheets, they have the police statements like before, but now they know if you lift the left sleeve you’ll find a gang tattoo and if you look you’ll see a scar where the defendant was once shot in the ankle. Some of the defendants are often surprised we know so much about them.’

In speeches praising intelligence-driven prosecution, Vance often cites the case of a 270-pound scam artist named Naim Jabbar, who for more than a decade made a living in the Times Square area bumping into pedestrians and then demanding money, saying they had broken his glasses. Convicted 19 times on the misdemeanor charge of ‘fraudulent accosting,’ Jabbar never served more than five months in jail until he was flagged by the C.S.U. His next arrest, in July 2010, triggered an alert. Instead of being offered a plea bargain, he was indicted and subsequently convicted on a felony robbery charge, and sentenced to three and a half to seven years in prison. With time served before his conviction, he was soon paroled and then arrested again, in July 2014, for another broken-eyeglasses incident and charged with robbery and grand larceny. 

More broadly, working with the Police Department and following a plan based on information developed by the C.S.U., the Violent Criminal Enterprises Unit, which Vance created in his first term, began taking down the most violent of Manhattan’s roughly 30 gangs; since 2011, 17 gangs have been dismantled, including three broken up last June at the Manhattanville and Grant housing projects, resulting in the largest number of gang indictments in a single operation. ‘There’s a reason murders in Manhattan went from 70 in 2010 to 29 so far this year,’ Karen Friedman Agnifilo, former chief of the Trial Division, told me late last year. (In January, Vance promoted Friedman Agnifilo to the No. 2 job, chief assistant district attorney.) ‘We figured out who are the people driving crime in Manhattan, and for four years we focused on taking them out.’”