New York’s Uneven Crime Drop

Why have murders and shootings plunged while other offenses remain elevated? Focused enforcement offers a clue.

Courtesy Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images

Earlier this month, the NYPD announced the fewest shootings and murders recorded through the first seven months of the year in New York City’s history. This decline—years in the making and accelerating since Commissioner Jessica Tisch took the helm at One Police Plaza in 2024—represents a major accomplishment for a city that seemed to be on the verge of a major backslide after shootings and murders spiked in 2020 and 2021.

The striking thing, though, is that New York’s broader crime picture has not improved nearly as dramatically. Major crime overall is down this year, but both felony and misdemeanor assaults are up slightly, as are rapes and transit crime. The contrast becomes more pronounced when one zooms out and compares today’s crime levels with the pre-pandemic era: many common offenses remain considerably more prevalent than they were in 2019, even as murders and shootings have fallen to historic lows.

To be sure, many other categories of what the NYPD considers “Major Crimes”—including robbery, burglary, and grand larceny—have also seen year-to-date declines, albeit modest ones. But relative to what the city experienced through August 16, 2019, the Big Apple has this year seen more felony assaults (44 percent), car thefts (143 percent), robberies (7 percent), burglaries (6 percent), grand larcenies (7 percent), and misdemeanor assaults (8 percent). That’s not what one would expect to see over a period in which murders and shootings are down 19 and 15 percent, respectively.

Criminologists have for years generally viewed homicides as one of the most reliable markers of general crime trends because they tend to have the highest reporting rates. They also constitute a category that is relatively difficult to manipulate, as happened recently in Washington D.C., where 13 senior police officials were placed on administrative leave amid allegations that crime statistics had been manipulated to make the city appear safer than it was. But in New York’s case, homicides have diverged from many of the other crime categories tracked by the city, which over the last several years have not declined at nearly the same rate, if at all.

In 2025, New York City experienced just 309 homicides—fewer than every year since 2018. Meantime, the city nevertheless reported more than 121,000 “major” felony crimes—more than the city reported in 15 of the 18 years that preceded it, and 30,000 more than in 2018.

The question is why these trendlines haven’t tracked one another. How has the department been able to drive homicides and shootings down to record lows without making nearly as much progress on other crime categories?

A recent paper coauthored by the University of Pennsylvania’s John MacDonald and Anthony Braga, along with George Mohler and P. Jeffrey Brantingham, suggests a plausible answer. Using data from Chicago, the researchers find that “modest increases in sanction certainty for high-risk individuals can substantially reduce shooting victims citywide.” Simply put, by getting the relatively small number of offenders that pose the highest risk of serious violence off the street and deterring those in their close networks of criminal associates, police can achieve much bigger declines in serious violence than they might expect from operations that targeted a much larger group of offenders who did not pose the same risk of committing a shooting.

This finding is consistent with much of what pro-enforcement experts have been saying for years. Because serious crime is so highly concentrated within tight social networks of especially prolific offenders—what the researchers call “tail risks”—communities get a bigger bang for their law-enforcement buck by meaningfully incapacitating those committing the largest shares of the costliest crimes. “[T]he concentration of shooting risk among a small number of high-rate offenders is not an empirical curiosity but a structural feature of urban gun violence,” the researchers write, adding that “crime control strategies targeting this tail yield disproportionate public safety returns.”

Under Commissioner Tisch, New York City seems to have delivered a real-world demonstration of that basic principle. Through sophisticated data analysis, the NYPD has focused on identifying patterns in serious violence as well as the high-risk offenders behind them. This allows the department to concentrate its limited enforcement resources where they are likely to have the greatest effect.

One of the most visible examples of that strategy is the department’s aggressive use of gang takedowns. Those who keep an eye on local crime coverage will have noticed the many announcements of operations in which the NYPD arrests members of violent, feuding gangs. Last year, the department was responsible for 70 such takedowns. The first 48 of those takedowns, according to the New York Post, swept up 347 gang members—an average of seven offenders per takedown, implying the city likely incapacitated more than 500 gang members in 2025 alone. Earlier this month, the NYPD announced that it had done another 25 through the first seven months of 2026.

As the NYPD has noted, these takedowns are not random. They are based on investigations driven by intelligence that the city carefully gathers—much of it through the Gun Violence Strategies Partnership, which the department describes as “a collaborative, multi-agency operation that brings together more than 30 federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to combat gun violence.”

The takeaway is clear and backed by new research: relentlessly focusing on the most violent and high-rate offenders has undeniably produced impressive results.

The challenge: the NYPD’s resources are limited relative to a decade ago, when the department had 3,000 more officers than it does now, and those officers had far fewer administrative burdens than today’s officers. Given how effective and efficient the NYPD has been in its mission to get the city’s homicide and shooting numbers down to record lows, New Yorkers have every reason to expect that a replenishment of its ranks will allow it to push the rest of the city’s crime categories onto a similarly steep downward trajectory. The cops are doing their job. It’s time for the mayor and city council to do theirs.