Crime in the Big Apple — one of the safest cities in the country — has plummeted to “staggering” lows this year.
Serious crimes have dropped by 10 percent compared with last year — marking the 19th consecutive year that felonies have gone down. And the murder rate will be its lowest in nearly 50 years.
Mayor Bloomberg, speaking at a graduation ceremony for a class of 250 NYPD cops, called the decline “staggering” and impressive considering the deep recession, when “the conventional wisdom is that when the economy suffers, crimes goes up.”
Topping the decline again is murder with 461 through last Sunday, an 11 percent drop over the 516 for the same period last year.
That means the number of homicides this year will likely top out around 470, which would be the fewest since the early 1960s. The murder rate in 1961 was 483, and in 1960 it was 390.
By comparison, there were 2,245 murders in 1990. The near-record-shattering numbers of robberies, rapes, assaults and auto thefts that year led the city to allocate resources to expand the NYPD force.
“The [NYPD] has reduced crime by 35 percent and helped to stop at least 10 terrorist plots [since 9/11],” Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday.
Officials also attribute the rapid drop in crime to CompStat — the department’s computerized crime-tracking system launched nearly 16 years ago.
“Everyone thinks CompStat was a great idea,” Bloomberg said, referring to the weekly meetings where supervisors are grilled about crime in their commands by the brass.
“But CompStat isn’t just gathering data. What is different in New York is that [Kelly] takes the data and adjusts what he does, tactics, deployment of resources based on the data almost in real time,” the mayor said.
With the exception of felony assaults, which are up 1.9 percent this year, numbers in every other major crime category dropped off.
The overall crime decline was felt in every borough, with The Bronx recording a 20 percent drop in murders. Manhattan recorded 60 slayings, compared to 500 in 1990.
To illustrate the historic drops, 104,462 serious crimes were recorded in the city through last Sunday. In 1990, there were 100,000 robberies reported alone.