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Not everything is as it seems in NYC’s crime reports.
New York City crime isn’t just a hot-button political issue; it’s also a concrete measure of how healthy public life is in the nation’s biggest city. So, whether crime is up or down in the Big Apple matters — for many reasons — which is why the question is fiercely debated and closely scrutinized. Unfortunately, the city doesn’t make it as easy as it could be for the public to track, understand, and contextualize the crime data it releases, which has led to some skepticism about the much-touted declines in crime that the NYPD has been claiming over the past 14 months. What are we to make of these conflicting claims? How is New York City really doing on crime?
The answer is two-fold: New York got safer in 2024 and ’25 — especially with respect to gun violence. But on other crime measures, the city remains well above pre-pandemic lows.
The city experienced two of its safest years in 2017 and 2018. But in 2020, homicides and shootings surged by 47% and 97%, respectively. The pandemic-related shutdowns kept New Yorkers indoors most of that year, leading to a decline in other major felony offenses tracked by the city. These offenses tend to have a more diverse set of victims than homicides and shootings, which often involve victims who are part of the same criminal networks as the perpetrators. However, the reported drop in crimes like robbery and assault concealed an important reality: when accounting for the reduced time potential victims spent outside (where such crimes usually happen), there was a sharp increase in the risk of assault and robbery in New York — by roughly 10-15%.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Daily Wire
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Rafael Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He is also the author of Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most.
