By Thomas Tracy
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — Shootings dropped to record levels in New York City during the first three months of this year, NYPD officials said Thursday.
The city saw a 23% drop in shootings for the first three months of the year compared to the same period last year, from 182 incidents to 140.
Crime in the subway system has dropped by 18%, helped by a massive influx of police officers to patrol trains and subway platforms. This was the first time there have been no murders in the subway in the first three months of the year in the last seven years.
The number of shootings citywide between January and March has not been this low since the CompStat era began in the 1990s and cops began to diligently track crimes, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.
Tisch credits the NYPD’s precision policing model, in which officers are sent to areas with the highest concentrations of crime. In the first quarter, major crime in these zones dropped 25% compared to the same period last year, cops said.
Overall, major crime has dropped citywide by 10% for the first three months of the year, from 29,169 crimes last year to 25,987 this year.
“Our precision policing strategies aren’t just working — they’re delivering historic results and making New York City the safest big city in the nation,” Tisch said during a press conference at NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza in lower Manhattan Thursday.
The drop in shootings began in January when gunplay in the city fell by 21% compared to January 2024 . The sharp decline was bolstered by a five-day streak with no shooting victims, officials said.
Murders citywide have dropped by 34% in the first three months of the year compared to last year.
For the first three months of the year, NYPD detectives investigated 63 murders compared to 99 during that same time frame last year.
Cops also investigated 465 crimes in the city subway as of March 31 , cops said. By this time last year police had investigated 568 incidents. This year’s crime numbers are the second lowest on the rails in 27 years.
“Our subways are safer than they’ve been in nearly a decade,” Tisch said.
The only major crime category to see an uptick citywide was rape, which jumped from 370 incidents between January and March last year to 447 this year.
The NYPD said that a large number of this year’s rape cases are incidents that happened in past years. Recent legislative reforms that have broadened the definition of sexual assault have also played a role in the increase, cops said.
Following a directive by Gov. Hochul , the NYPD began putting police on every overnight subway train in January to bolster the visibility of law enforcement officers on city mass transit.
Officials said that the initiative, which brought an additional 750 officers in stations and on platforms, came at a cost of $154 million in overtime.
“People want to see police officers on the trains and in the stations,” Hochul said in January.
Mayor Eric Adams celebrated the drop in crime and said it was part of a larger trend.
“We have seen five straight quarters of declining crime, including the past six months,” Adams said. “Thanks to the tens of thousands of brave men and women of the NYPD , New York City remains the safest big city in America, and we are only getting safer.”
—
©2025 New York Daily News. Visit at nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
