Yes, home burglaries are usually reported and tracked in data. But, as it says in this very New York Times article, package theft goes completely unreported and is therefore not part of your statistics. Likewise, sexual assaults in subways are only very recently being tracked in New York. Why did you choose, by the way, to assume I was only talking about property crime? The types of crimes not tracked by NYPD is vast, and such crime I have seen escalating year over year.
Stats are stats, but if you live in New York, you notice how 10 years ago people didn't rob Walgreens, and now they rob it all the time practically on an on-going basis. You just take what you need and walk past "security." See some boxes inside a vestibule? They're yours. But it's not just property crime, it's all crime.
You may be noticing these issues more, but that's because you're older and have seen more examples over the years, and perhaps have gotten more invested in your community -- not because they are universally more common across the country.
If you take the stats you cite as truth, I don't know how you square these stats with the contents of the original post itself.
As you know, stats represent a sample. Beyond the sample, there is reality.
I've lived pretty much my whole life in New York City (54 years) and it's safer and better than it's ever been.
Sure, there is crime. But things are so much better than they've been in my lifetime that your complaints ring really hollow to me.
I could recount countless episodes of violence, criminal activity and general bad behavior over the past 45 years or so (with the police certainly not excluded from those. Not by a long shot), but I won't bother. The statistics speak for themselves.
I've had my packages stolen a few times. And if the lazy, rapacious, scumbag managing agents for my apartment building cared to do their jobs, the person(s) (there are several known to me who almost certainly are responsible), would have been identified through the video cameras (I used to have access to them, but that was removed when the building was sold 8 years ago or so) and arrested. And that would be a strong deterrent.
Not sure where you live (although I'd be surprised if you actually lived in NYC given your seeming lack of knowledge about conditions here), but you're flat wrong and have provided exactly zero evidence to support your inaccurate pronouncements.
For example, household burglary dropped 56% from 1994 to 2011. https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4657
Theft and motor vehicle theft have had similar major drops (figures 10 and 11): https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mpcncvs.pdf
This data is from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which directly asks respondents if they have been the victim of a crime, and is not based on police reports or prosecutions.
The same decline has also been seen in violent crime, and is actually one of the major unanswered questions in modern criminology: why has crime declined by about half since 1990? There are many theories (you've probably seen the theories involving lead or pollution exposure) but no definitive answers. But whatever the explanation may be, it does not justify brutal punishment, since (a) crime is declining, not increasing, and (b) I'm not aware of any substantial evidence showing a major deterrent effect of severe prison sentences or even capital punishment.