Bloomberg — New York City crime fell in five of seven major categories in the first six months of the year compared with the same period in 2022, police officials said Thursday.
Murders declined by 7.9%, reported rapes were down 9.9%, robberies fell by 4.8%, burglaries declined by 9.9% and grand larcenies decreased by 1.3% through the end of June, acting Police Commissioner Edward Caban said at a news briefing.
In the transit system, major crimes declined by roughly 4.4% in the first half, even though the city saw an 18% spike in subway crimes in June of this year, NYPD officials said.
The only two categories that saw an increase were felony assaults, which rose 11.3%, and car thefts, which jumped 17.2%. About a third of the arrests for car thefts were of people under age 18. Police have previously attributed an increase in auto thefts to a Tik-Tok challenge involving Hyundai and Kia cars.
Shootings also declined in the first six months of 2023, by roughly 24%, NYPD data shows, though overall shooting incidents are still higher than they were in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic began.
NYPD officials say the recently improving crime rates in some categories bolster the case for the department’s more aggressive policing tactics under Mayor Eric Adams’s administration. The mayor, in his second year, campaigned on a promise to reduce crime.
In 2022, NYPD officers made more than 673,000 traffic stops of mostly Black and Latino pedestrians, although only 2% of those stops resulted in arrests, raising concerns among police reform and civil liberties advocates about racial disparities in the city’s policing tactics.
On Thursday, NYPD officials said the city had made 25,995 arrests in the seven major crime categories, the most for any six-month period since the year 2000.
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