Cyrus Vance Jr

A glance at New York City crime statistics might lead you to conclude that Cyrus Vance Jr., the district attorney of New York County, no longer works in what William Travers Jerome, who held the job more than a century ago, once called “the mouth of hell.” Nowhere have declining crime trends been more striking than in Manhattan, where last year burglaries, shootings and murders were the lowest since the city began keeping formal records in the early 1960s; so far this year, statistically speaking, the epidemic of civility rages on. It’s still a shock — where did Gotham go, the dangerous dark of nighttime Central Park, the East Village addicts brandishing box cutters, the cardsharps and sallow denizens of Times Square, which now seems overrun by Elmo impersonators and wide-eyed naïfs in fanny packs?Article