The CDC primarily measured average COVID cases through waste contamination tests, not hospitals testing and reporting numbers. If you cut the funding for those tests to the CDC then yeah, they aren’t going to do the sewage tests to measure the rates. No such thing has happened for the NYPD.

Crime rates usually come from the incident reports filed directly by police officers. In a healthy policing scenario, most of these incident reports are created from someone calling or notifying the police about something going on, not from them just stumbling onto something.

If anything may this indicate that police were purposely instigating and escalating incidents, depending on what the percentages of “community instigated incidents” are. It could also just mean that it is fucking cold outside and people just aren’t doing shit at all. These numbers don’t really mean anything without a hell of a lot of extra context.

However, the statistical relationship between an increase in policing and a decrease in crime has always been tenuous, at best.