New York Crime Keeps Falling, Mayor de Blasio Says; Cites Years of ‘Momentum’
Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Tuesday that a city his opponents once said would grow more dangerous under his watch had, in fact, become even safer.
Robberies, considered the most telling indicator of street crime, are down 14 percent across New York City from last year. Grand larcenies — including the thefts of Apple devices that officials said drove an overall crime increase two years ago — are also down, by roughly 3 percent.
And after a record-low 335 homicides in 2013, the city has seen 290 killings in the first 11 months of this year, a number unheard-of two decades ago.
“When I came into this job, people always talked about last year — last year was an amazing year in this city in terms of bringing down crime,” Mr. de Blasio said. “We saw what was possible. The city’s crime rate continues to go down.”
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Even shootings, which had increased by more than 10 percent earlier this year, have receded amid a push by the Police Department to stamp out troublesome pockets of gun violence. There were just over 1,000 shootings in the first 11 months of this year, about a 4 percent increase over last year.
The announcement on Tuesday, which, at the beginning of December, came earlier than in years past, appeared timed to precede a decision by a Staten Island grand jury that is investigating officers’ actions in the case of Eric Garner, who died after a police chokehold during an arrest in July.
The announcement also comes less than two weeks after an officer shot and killed an unarmed man, Akai Gurley, while patrolling a Brooklyn housing development in what the police described as an accidental shooting. Both Mr. Garner and Mr. Gurley were black.
For Mr. de Blasio and his police commissioner, William J. Bratton, the numbers provided a kind of cushion for the criminal justice and policing reforms that both men are putting into place.
Officers will this week begin a pilot program of wearing body cameras in three police commands, Mr. Bratton said on Tuesday, and a wholesale retraining of the department’s patrol force is also starting. A new marijuana policy aimed at reducing low-level arrests, which was announced in November, has already resulted in a 61.2 percent decline in arrests in its first two full weeks.
“We can see with our own eyes, we can experience in our own lives, a safer city,” Mr. de Blasio said, “and a city that is becoming more unified.”
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