In February, the city saw a 14.5% decline in major crime compared to the same month in 2024. That builds on double-digit decreases in January and last December. It’s absolutely worth celebrating and Mayor Adams, who has made crime-fighting a priority, should take a bow.
The cause could be the leadership of Police Commissioner Jessie Tisch — who’s clearing out dead wood and, driven by data, refocusing the NYPD on its core mission. It might just be the frigid end of 2024 and start of 2025. It might be a little of both or something else entirely. But there are some very positive public safety trends afoot in New York City right now. Just as people’s hair catches on fire when things are going in the wrong direction, we should appreciate progress.
Robbery, once considered the bellwether of street dangerousness, dropped 25% from last February to this. Grand larceny was down 17%. Felony assaults, a crime that has seen sharp and stubborn increases since the pandemic, went down 6%. Murders fell by 32%.
And in the first two months of 2025, the city suffered 93 shooting incidents — the lowest total over that period since the city began keeping this particular statistic back in 1993.
Those aren’t just lower numbers. They represent less human tragedy rippling through families and communities, and less fear and more confidence among New Yorkers.
The NYPD attributes the results to “zone-based policing,” or sending officers to locations experiencing spikes in violence and disorder and then keeping their boots on the sidewalks. And it attributes a 15% February-to-February decline on subway crime to an increased police presence on platforms and in trains.
It’s also got to help that Tisch has gotten hundreds of officers out of desk jobs and into the streets, and most of all is focusing police on the recidivists who commit the lion’s share of violent crime using every tool the department’s got.
The police will use every tool at their disposal to pursue and incapacitate people who keep committing serious crimes, and hopefully they’ll get an assist or two from Albany, where legislators need to tweak discovery laws and other statutes that were sloppily amended back in 2019.
Be optimistic, but schedule no victory parades yet. The sobering reality is that we’re not nearly back to prepandemic lows. February 2025 felony counts (around 7,800) were nearly 30% higher than February 2019 totals (around 6,000). Still, journeys start with steps, and the city is on its way — finally really starting to make good on the core promise of Eric Adams’ mayoralty.
Too bad it took this long, no doubt in part because the upper echelons of police leadership and public safety leadership in City Hall heavily weighted with Adams’ close buddies, rather than the best people for the job.
Again, we caution: Criminologists are still debating to what extent the city’s great crime decline of the 1990s was the result of police strategy changes like CompStat and broken-windows policing, and to what extent it resulted from rising incarceration rates, the end of the crack epidemic, demographic shifts and economic growth. There’s no way we can confidently diagnose what’s driving a brand new crime decline that could well reverse at any moment.
For now, we hope and pray that replicable strategies are driving the progress — because that would mean the gains will continue and perhaps even accelerate.