New York remains the “safest big city in America,” Mayor Adams crowed Wednesday as he and the NYPD said efforts to get guns off the street and enforce quality of life significantly curbed crime in 2023.
Murders fell by 11.9%, to 386 reported in 2023 compared to 438 in 2022, police data shows.
When 2023 is compared to 2022, rapes were down 10.5%, robberies were down 3.1%, grand larceny thefts were down 2.5% and burglaries were down 13.1%, the city’s crime data shows.
The number of shooting victims on city streets — who are counted separately from the underlying crimes that led them to be shot — in 2023 declined by 27%, to 1,150 from the 1,566 shooting victims reported in 2022.
Adams said the data shows police are bringing order to city streets.
“The results are clear — crime is down, jobs are up, tourism is back,” Adams said at a One Police Plaza news conference. “But our work is not done. We’re not spiking the ball. We’re not saying, ‘Mission Accomplished.’
“There’s so much more we have to do.”
While the improvements were dramatic in the most violent crime categories, the overall crime rate — based on seven major felonies — didn’t drop as sharply. Taken together, the number of reported major felonies declined 1% in 2023.
A 15% increase in the number of stolen cars and a 6% jump in assaults kept the overall crime rate from dropping further, the data shows.
Adams said the turning point happened in January 2022, the first month of his administration, when officers Wilbert Mora and Jason Rivera were shot and killed in Harlem. A third officer at the scene shot the suspect dead.
“I walked out of the hospital that day and realized we were not going to surrender our streets to those who want to bring about violence,” Adams said. “But our city is in a different place now. Where we were on Jan.1, 2002 is not where we are now.”
Police Commissioner Edward Caban, who was the first deputy police commissioner when Mora and Rivera died, said the mood in the city was starkly different then.
“There was a sense of lawlessness,” Caban said. “And we would not tolerate it.”
The commissioner said the NYPD’s continued “efforts to combat gun violence” — which resulted in the seizure of more than 13,500 guns in the last two years — created “ripple effects” that helped drive down other felonies.
Chief of Patrol John Chell said police have focused on key quality of life issues, including a leading source of complaints from New Yorkers — the proliferation of illegal ATVs and unregistered mopeds.
More than 27,000 were seized in 2023, up from about 18,000 in 2002, Chell said.
And, he noted, the city last year shut down about 50 illegal smoke shops, and that nuisance abatement actions are pending against more than 450. Authorities seized more than $25 million in drug paraphernalia during these actions, Chell said, and $52 million worth of summonses were issued.
At one point during the press conference, Adams held up a photo of a homeless man at an encampment he said was in “another city in America.”
Chell said a police task force helped clear more than 5,300 encampments in 2023.
“Now I don’t see a lot of them anymore,” Chell said. “And I’m sure that you don’t.”
