New York City's crime rate hit a record low in 2016, continuing a decades-long drop that has made it the safest big city in the United States.
According to data released by the NYPD Wednesday, there were 101,606 crimes recorded in the city last year, a 4 percent drop from 2015. Murders were down from 352 in 2015 to 335, a hair above the record low of 333 reported in 2014. Shooting incidents dropped more than 12 percent to 998, falling below 1,000 for the first time on record. (Shooting incidents can involve multiple shootings; the number of total shooting victims was over 1,100).
There were also significant drops in the number of robberies and burglaries, and small drops in the number of rapes and grand larcenies. The number of felony assaults increased slightly to 20,807, a 2 percent increase from 2015.
"We have been working hard at reducing crime to historic lows, when many said it could not be done," Police Commissioner James O'Neill said in a press release announcing the statistics.
Crime has been dropping in New York City for more than two decades, across multiple mayoral administrations. The 101,606 crimes recorded in 2016 is around half the number recorded in 2000. Back in 1990, the NYPD recorded 527,257 major crimes—five times as many as the 2016 numbers. (The city's population has also increased by 1.2 million since then.)
Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned heavily on police reform in 2013, and while he has been praised for drastically curtailing "stop and frisk," advocates of police reform have criticized his commitment to "Broken Windows" policing, which they say criminalizes communities of color without a discernible impact on public safety.
NYPD Chief of Department Carlos Gomez and Mayor Bill de Blasio tour a photo exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum before a press conference announcing the 2016 crime statistics. (DCPI)
"One of our basic points about Broken Windows policing is there is an argument about whether it's effective as a crime-fighting strategy," said Robert Gangi of the Police Reform Organizing Project. "What there's no argument about, although the NYPD would deny it, is that it's racist."
Gangi pointed to a June 2016 report from the New York City Department of Investigation that found no link between criminal enforcement of quality-of-life statutes, like prohibitions on riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, public urination, or turnstile jumping, and incidence of more serious felony crime. (The NYPD called the report "deeply flawed.")
Gangi also expressed skepticism about the NYPD statistics. "You never trust the numbers produced by an agency whose performance is evaluated by producing numbers," he said. "We know that crime is much lower than it was 20 years ago in the city; what we're cynical about is the specific numbers."
According to a report from the NY Times, a major driver of the decrease in shootings citywide has been a decrease in gang activity. The report found that gang-related shooting incidents dropped from 560 in 2015 to 412, a decrease of around 35 percent. Gang-related murders were also sharply down, to 79 from 129 in 2015.
Council Member Jumaane Williams, who has been a leading advocate for police reform in the City Council, credited Mayor de Blasio and NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill for discussing crime rates in a context beyond law enforcement, but said he worries that if crime rates tick back up, the city could abandon key efforts like investments in jobs for young people and anti-violence programs.
"I think it's important to concretize this work so it's not a knee-jerk reaction to reverse it if crimes spike at some point. Because we do know that's how crime works, it ebbs and flows," he said.
"We're moving in the right direction, but it's easy to stop moving in that direction and to turn course."
The NYPD and the mayor's office did not respond to requests for comment.
