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The city recorded the fewest shootings and murders in its modern history through the first 10 months of the year, according to figures released Monday by the NYPD. The department said both the city and its transit system also saw record-low crime levels for the month of October, extending declines in overall crime to eight straight quarters, officials said.
Through October, the city logged 596 shooting incidents and 744 shooting victims — the lowest totals since data on those incidents has been tracked, and down from previous lows of 641 and 768 in 2018. Murders also reached historic lows, with just 18 recorded in October, matching the previous record set seven years ago and nearly half the number reported a year earlier.
“This isn’t luck or coincidence — it’s the direct result of our precision policing strategy and the relentless work of the men and women of the NYPD,” Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said in a statement accompanying the department’s release of monthly crime stats. “These historic public safety milestones are reaching every corner of New York City.”
Mayor Eric Adams, who has made public safety the central theme of his administration, said the numbers validated his approach. “A safer city has always been our administration’s North Star,” he said, crediting the NYPD’s “precision policing” plan for the sustained reductions.
The department said its Fall Violence Reduction Plan, launched in mid-October, has been a major driver of the downtick in crime The effort deploys as many as 1,800 uniformed officers nightly in 54 zones across 38 communities, concentrating on precincts, housing developments and subway stations identified through data analysis. Since the program’s start on Oct. 13, index crime in those zones has dropped 26.6 percent, while shootings declined 41.7 percent during deployment hours, police said in a release accompanying the crime stats.
The NYPD also credited its ongoing gang takedowns and gun-seizure operations for reducing lethal violence. Detectives have conducted 57 gang-related operations this year and have confiscated more than 4,600 illegal firearms since January — part of more than 24,000 guns seized citywide since the start of Adams’s term, the NYPD said.
Transit crime, a perennial focus of public concern after several high-profile incidents on subways, declined 14.4 percent in October compared with a year earlier, the NYPD said, marking the safest October on record for the system. The combined months of July through October were the safest four-month period ever in the subway system outside of the pandemic years, when ridership was sharply reduced.
Across the seven major crime categories, overall index crime fell 6.5 percent citywide last month, with murders down by nearly 50 percent. Felony assaults dropped 7.2 percent after several years of increases, while burglaries fell 8.9 percent and robberies 11.6 percent. Grand larcenies declined 1.6 percent and auto theft 14.3 percent.
One exception was rape, which rose 8.6 percent from a year earlier. The NYPD said the increase partly reflects changes to state law enacted in 2024 that broadened the legal definition of rape to include additional forms of sexual assault.
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