Call that an earthquake? By LA standards it was nothing.

Good morning. It’s Thursday. We will learn more about the earthquake that shook New York a little bit. We’ll also unpack statistics showing that overall crime fell slightly in New York City last year.

New York City experienced an earthquake – a magnitude 1.7 earthquake. This was before dawn on Tuesday.

In journalism you hear a lot about providing context, so I did the obvious: I reached out to a few people in Los Angeles. One was Adam Nagourney, a Times reporter who moved there years ago after being named Los Angeles bureau chief.

He said that when he feels even the slightest vibration, he looks at the X platform. He can judge how extensive and serious it was by the “did you feel that” messages that inevitably pop up.

“That said, and no offense to my friends in Queens,” he told me, “a magnitude 1.7 earthquake wouldn’t even merit a tweet here. It’s background noise, if it’s noise at all. I think it has to get above 3 or 3.5 before people notice it.”

The same could be true in New York. And it’s probably worth noting that a Earthquake with a magnitude of 1.2 was reported Wednesday morning near Loma Linda, California, about 60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, according to a post on X from Quakebot, a computer application that sends a message when the United States Geological Survey detects an earthquake. This followed A Earthquake with a magnitude of 4.1 that was felt during the Rose Parade on Monday in Pasadena, California.

Thomas Pratt, a research geophysicist for the Geological Survey, told my colleague Erin Nolan that New York experiences numerous small earthquakes every year. Most go unnoticed because they originate underground, sometimes up to 20 kilometers deep. Tuesday’s in Queens started only about three miles below the surface.

There was a time when there were major earthquakes in the New York area. That was before it was New York, before it was New Amsterdam and even before that, when the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano had given it a French name because his expeditions were supported by a French king.

Hundreds of millions of years earlier, the land now called New York had been tossed back and forth as continents collided. John Mutter, a professor of earth and environmental studies at Columbia University, said the fault lines running through the Mid-Atlantic region have calmed down over time.

“A lot of what you feel here, these little earthquakes, are a resolution of the tensions of the past,” Mutter told Erin. The contractions of what was a very active plate boundary a very long time ago won’t just stop, he added: “It will take a while for everything to settle down.”

It is unlikely that a major earthquake will hit the city and cause significant structural damage. More often than not, even noticeable earthquakes don’t cause any real damage, Mutter said.

“The problem with buildings in New York City — and you see it all the time with scaffolding structures — is that the facades are often quite fragile,” Mutter said. “If you had a reasonably decent earthquake, in New York you would see air conditioners falling out of windows, or flower boxes, or ornate facades.”

Weather

Prepare for a chance of showers on a day that starts cloudy then turns mostly sunny, with a high in the mid-40s. Gusty winds will continue through a mostly clear evening, with temperatures dropping into the mid-20s.

ALTERNATE PARKING

Valid until Saturday (Three Kings Day).

Total crime has fallen slightly

Overall crime in New York City fell slightly last year compared to 2022, but crimes and car thefts soared, police said Wednesday.

The total number of crimes decreased by 0.32 percent. Police officials said there was a significant drop in shootings and homicides, as well as in the categories that police consider major crimes: robberies, burglaries, assaults and grand thefts.

• More people were victims of crime: 27,849, an increase of 6.3 percent.

• More car thefts were reported: 15,802, an increase of 15 percent.

Mayor Eric Adams said the drop in overall crime was a sign that the city was making progress in its efforts to improve public safety and strengthen the perception that the city is a safe place for residents and tourists.

Adams appeared to take a swipe at a bill called the How many stops to trade, which the city council adopted just before Christmas. It would require police officers to record information when they stop someone on the street, and not just when they are investigating a crime. Adams said Wednesday that his administration would push back on “any form of forcing our officers not to do police work and not to do paperwork.”

Adams said critics of police were out of touch with “working New Yorkers” and cited Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, who pushed for the bill. Adams described Williams as an isolated public servant who “lives in a fortress,” does not ride the subway and is controlled by a police detail. (Adams also has its own police detail.)

Williams later called the mayor’s comments those of a “5-year-old throwing a tantrum and clutching at straws.”

The latest Metro news

Gov. Kathy Hochul won’t give her State of the State address until next week, but this week she previewed her message.

On Tuesday, she called for new consumer protection laws “to place stronger regulatory guardrails around the ‘buy now, pay later loan’ industry.”

On Wednesday, she went to an elementary school outside Albany to propose “long overdue” changes in the way reading is taught in many New York schools.

She was introduced by a fourth grader, Nathan Rogers, who said he loves reading so much that he has a stash of books under his bed. Hochul said she had been a reader when she was about his age: As a third grader, she said, she was fascinated by a biography of the abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

“I looked at it so many times that one day the library said, ‘Why don’t you just keep it,’” she said.

Now New York, once a national leader in education reform, ranks 32nd in reading proficiency. Hochul wants to spend $10 million to retrain teachers in what’s known as the “science of reading,” teaching children to pronounce words, decode them and understand their meaning.

She also calls for updated state standards and for new programs at the State University of New York and City University of New York to teach these methods to teachers.

She said the changes would bring New York “in line with the nation’s best practices.” New York City announced last year that it would begin an overhaul of reading instruction in all its elementary schools.

In addition to previewing the state of the state, Hochul told reporters about the condition of her left arm. It was in a sling.

“I tore the pec in the gym,” she said. She said she had lifted 70 pounds when, in the spirit of New Year’s fitness resolutions, she tried another 10 — “and my body said no to 80.”

METROPOLITAN diary

Bright spot in the sky

Dear Diary:

I was up early catching up on papers for my classes when I heard a garbage truck driving down my street in Harlem. It was just before 6 o’clock and still dark outside. I realized I hadn’t taken out the trash.

I bagged the plastic and paper for recycling, but the truck had already passed my house when I got to the street.

I met one of the sanitation workers on the sidewalk.

“Plastic?” I have asked.

“Paper,” he said.

I chased the truck to the corner and threw my paper straight into it. It was then that my eyes saw an unmistakable point of light in the starless sky.

When he saw me stop, the worker stopped too.

I pointed upstairs.

“Venus,” I said.

His eyes followed my finger.

“This is Venus?” He said, his face breaking into a smile.

His colleague, who saw the two of us looking up, also looked up.

“Venus,” we all said together, standing there for a few moments without saying another word.

— Frederic Colier