Crime in New York City

Crime rates in New York City have been recorded since at least the 1800s. The highest crime totals were recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the crack epidemic surged, and then declined continuously from around 1990 throughout the 2000s. As of 2023, New York City has significantly lower rates of gun violence than many other large cities. Its 2022 homicide rate of 5.3 per 100,000 residents compares favorably to the rate in the United States as a whole (6.3 per 100,000) and to rates in much more violent cities such as New Orleans (71.9 per 100,000) and St. Louis (69.8 per 100,000 residents).
During the 1990s, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) adopted CompStat, broken windows policing, and other strategies in a major effort to reduce crime. The drop in crime has been variously attributed to a number of factors, including these changes to policing, the end of the crack epidemic, the increased incarceration rate nationwide, gentrification, an aging population, and the decline of lead poisoning in children.
Organized crime has long been associated with New York City, beginning with the Forty Thieves and the Roach Guards gangs in the Five Points area of Manhattan in the 1820s.
In 1835, the New York Herald was established by James Gordon Bennett, Sr., who helped revolutionize journalism by covering stories that appeal to the masses including crime reporting. When Helen Jewett was murdered on April 10, 1836, Bennett did innovative on-the-scene investigation and reporting and helped bring the story to national attention.
Peter Cooper, at the request of the Common Council, drew up a proposal to create a police force of 1,200 officers. The state legislature approved the proposal on May 7, 1844, and abolished the nightwatch system. Under Mayor William Havemeyer, the police force reorganized and officially established itself on May 13, 1845, as the New York Police Department (NYPD). The new system divided the city into three districts and set up courts, magistrates, clerks, and station houses.
Helen Jewett was an upscale New York City prostitute whose 1836 murder, along with the subsequent trial and acquittal of her alleged killer, Richard P. Robinson, generated an unprecedented amount of media coverage.
The murder of Mary Rogers in 1841 was heavily covered by the press, which also put the spotlight on the ineptitude and corruption in the city's watchmen system of law enforcement. At the time, New York City's population of 320,000 was served by an archaic force, consisting of one night watch, one hundred city marshals, thirty-one constables, and fifty-one police officers.
The New York City draft riots in July 1863 were violent disturbances in New York City that were the culmination of working-class discontention with new laws passed by the U. S. Congress during that year to draft men to fight in the ongoing American Civil War. The riots remain the largest civil insurrection in American history (with 119 to 120 fatalities) aside from the Civil War itself.
President Abraham Lincoln was forced to divert several regiments of militia and volunteer troops from following up after the Battle of Gettysburg to control the city. The rioters were overwhelmingly working-class men, primarily ethnic Irish, resenting particularly that wealthier men, who could afford to pay a $300 ($5,555 in 2014 dollars) commutation fee to hire a substitute, were spared from the draft.
Initially intended to express anger at the draft, the protests turned into a race riot, with white rioters, mainly but not exclusively Irish immigrants, attacking blacks wherever they could be found. At least 11 blacks are estimated to have been killed. The conditions in the city were such that Major General John E. Wool, commander of the Department of the East, stated on July 16 that, "Martial law ought to be proclaimed, but I have not a sufficient force to enforce it." The military did not reach the city until after the first day of rioting, when mobs had already ransacked or destroyed numerous public buildings, two Protestant churches, the homes of various abolitionists or sympathizers, many black homes, and the Colored Orphan Asylum at 44th Street and Fifth Avenue, which was burned to the ground.
In 1870, the Orange Riots were incited by Irish Protestants celebrating the Battle of the Boyne with parades through predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhoods. In the resulting police action, 63 citizens, mostly Irish, were killed.
The Tompkins Square Riot occurred on January 13, 1874, when police violently suppressed a demonstration involving thousands of people in Tompkins Square Park.
High-profile crimes include:
Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner attribute the drop in crime to the legalization of abortion in the 1970s, as they suggest that many would-be neglected children and criminals were never born. On the other hand, Malcolm Gladwell provides a different explanation in his book The Tipping Point; he argues that crime was an "epidemic" and a small reduction by the police was enough to "tip" the balance. Another theory is that widespread exposure to lead pollution from automobile exhaust, which can lower intelligence and increase aggression levels, incited the initial crime wave in the mid-20th century, most acutely affecting heavily trafficked cities like New York. A strong correlation was found demonstrating that violent crime rates in New York and other big cities began to fall after lead was removed from American gasoline in the 1970s.
In the 20th century, notorious New York-based mobsters Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano made headlines. The century's later decades are more famous for Mafia prosecutions (and prosecutors like Rudolph Giuliani) than for the influence of the Five Families.
Violent gangs such as the Black Spades and the Westies influenced crime in the 1970s.
The Bloods, Crips and MS-13 gangs of Los Angeles arrived in the city in the 1980s, but gained notoriety when they appeared on Rikers Island in 1993 to fight off the already established Latin Kings gang.
Chinese gangs were also prominent in Chinatown, Manhattan, notably Ghost Shadows and Flying Dragons.
From the 1990s until their 2013 arrest by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a sting operation, an Orthodox Jewish gang led by Mendel Epstein and Martin Wolmark kidnapped and tortured a number of Jewish men from Borough Park and Midwood, Brooklyn in troubled marriages to force them into granting religious divorces to their wives, some of whom Epstein charged up to $100,000 to commit the crimes.
Crime on the New York City Subway reached a peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the city's subway having a crime rate higher than that of any other mass transit system in the world. During the 2000s, the subway had a lower crime rate, as crime started dropping in the 1990s.
Various approaches have been used to fight crime. A 2012 initiative by the MTA to prevent crime is to ban people who commit one in the subway system from entering it for a certain length of time.
In the 1960s, mayor Robert Wagner ordered an increase in the Transit Police force from 1,219 to 3,100 officers. During the hours at which crimes most frequently occurred (between 8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.), the officers went on patrol in all stations and trains. In response, crime rates decreased, as extensively reported by the press.
However, as a consequence of the city's 1976 fiscal crisis, service had become poor and crime had gone up, with crime being announced on the subway almost every day. Additionally, there were 11 "crimes against the infrastructure" in open cut areas of the subway in 1977, where TA staff were injured, some seriously. There were other rampant crimes as well. For example, in the first two weeks of December 1977, "Operation Subway Sweep" resulted in the arrest of over 200 robbery suspects. Passengers were afraid of crime, fed up with long waits for trains that were shortened to save money and upset over the general malfunctioning of the system. The subway also had many dark subway cars. Further compounding the issue, on July 13, 1977, a blackout cut off electricity to most of the city and to Westchester. Due to a sudden increase in violent crimes on the subway in the last week of 1978, police statistics about crime in the subway were being questioned. In 1979, six murders on the subway occurred in the first two months of the year, compared to nine during the entire previous year. The IRT Lexington Avenue Line was known to be frequented by muggers, so in February 1979, a group headed by Curtis Sliwa began unarmed patrols of the 4 train during the night time, in an effort to discourage crime. They were known as the Guardian Angels, and would eventually expand their operations into other parts of the five boroughs. By February 1980, the Guardian Angels' ranks numbered 220.
In March 1979, Mayor Ed Koch asked the city's top law enforcement officials to devise a plan to counteract rising subway violence and to stop insisting that the subways were safer than the streets. Two weeks after Koch's request, top TA cops were publicly requesting Transit Police Chief Sanford Garelik's resignation because they claimed that he had lost control of the fight against subway crime. Finally, on September 11, 1979, Garelik was fired, and replaced with Deputy Chief of Personnel James B. Meehan, reporting directly to City Police Commissioner Robert J. McGuire. Garelik continued in his role of chief of security for the MTA. By September 1979, around 250 felonies per week (or about 13,000 that year) were being recorded on the subway, making the crime rate the most of any other mass transit network anywhere in the world. Some police officers supposedly could not act upon the quality of life crimes and were only to look for violent crimes.
Among other problems the following were included:
Meehan had claimed to be able to, along with 2,300 police officers, "provide sufficient protection to straphangers", but Sliwa had brought a group together to act upon crime, so that between March 1979 and March 1980, felonies per day dropped from 261 to 154. However, overall crime grew by 70% between 1979 and 1980.
On the IRT Pelham Line in 1980, a sharp rise in window-smashing on subway cars caused $2 million in damages; it spread to other lines during the course of the year. When the broken windows were discovered in trains that were still in service, they needed to be taken out of service, causing additional delays; in August 1980 alone, 775 vandalism-related delays were reported. Vandalism of subway cars, including windows, continued through the mid-1980s; between January 27 and February 2, 1985, 1,129 pieces of glass were replaced on subway cars on the 1, 6, CC, E, and K trains. Often, bus transfers, sold on the street for 50 cents, were also sold illegally, mainly at subway-to-bus transfer hubs. Mayor Koch even proposed to put a subway court in the Times Square subway station to speed up arraignments, as there were so many subway-related crimes by then. Meanwhile, high-ranking senior City Hall and transit officials considered raising the fare from 60 to 65 cents to fund additional transit police officers, who began to ride the subway during late nights (between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m.) owing to a sharp increase in crime in 1982. Operation High Visibility commenced in June 1985, had this program extended to 6 a.m., and a police officer was to be present on every train in the system during that time.
On January 20, 1982, MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch told the business group Association for a Better New York that he would not let his teenage sons ride the subway at night, and that even he, as the subway chairman, was nervous riding the trains. The MTA began to discuss how the ridership issue could be fixed, but by October 1982, mostly due to fears about transit crime, poor subway performance, and some economic factors, ridership on the subway was at extremely low levels matching 1917 ridership. Within less than ten years, the MTA had lost around 300 million passengers, mainly because of fears of crime. In July 1985, the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City published a study showing this trend, fearing the frequent robberies and generally bad circumstances. As a result, the Fixing Broken Windows policy, which proposed to stop large-profile crimes by prosecuting quality of life crimes, was implemented. Along this line of thinking, the MTA began a five-year program to eradicate graffiti from subway trains in 1984.
To attract passengers, the TA tried to introduce the "Train to the Plane", a service staffed by a transit police officer 24/7. This was discontinued in 1990 due to low ridership and malfunctioning equipment.
In 1989, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority asked the transit police (then located within the NYCTA) to focus on minor offenses such as fare evasion. In the early nineties, the NYCTA adopted similar policing methods for Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal. When in 1993, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir were elected to official positions, the Broken Windows strategy was more widely deployed in New York under the rubrics of "zero tolerance" and "quality of life". Crime rates in the subway and city dropped, prompting New York magazine to declare "The End of Crime as We Know It" on the cover of its edition of August 14, 1995. Giuliani's campaign credited the success to the zero-tolerance policy. The extent to which his policies deserve the credit is disputed. Incoming New York City Police Department Commissioner William J. Bratton and author of Fixing Broken Windows, George L. Kelling, however, stated the police played an "important, even central, role" in the declining crime rates. The trend continued and Giuliani's successor, Michael Bloomberg, stated in a November 2004 press release that "Today, the subway system is safer than it has been at any time since we started tabulating subway crime statistics nearly 40 years ago."
Shoving attacks has become a noticeable problem ever since the 2000s, leading to multiple murders, as the subway lacks platform screen doors. In 2022, the New York City subway chief told commuters to stay off the platform edge as much as possible. The MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber stated that are also looking into "making changes to subway platforms", and that "these (shoving) incidents are unacceptable and have to stop." In 2022, the MTA announced that it will be trialing platform doors at three subway stations.
Two cases in 2011 – those of Bob Oliva and Ernie Lorch – have both centered in highly ranked youth basketball programs sponsored by churches of different denominations. In early 2011, Oliva, a long-time basketball coach at Christ the King Regional High School, was accused of two cases of child sexual abuse.
In Manhattan, Father Bruce Ritter, founder of Covenant House, was forced to resign in 1990 after accusations that he had engaged in financial improprieties and had engaged in sexual relations with several youth in the care of the charity.
In December 2012, the president of the Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva University apologized over allegations that two rabbis at the college's high school campus abused boys there in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In New York City, legislation was enacted in 2006, affecting many areas of nightlife. This legislation was in response to a number of murders which occurred in the New York City area, some involving nightclubs and bouncers. The city council introduced four pieces of legislation to help combat these problems, including Imette's Law, which required stronger background checks for bouncers. Among the legislative actions taken were the requirement of ID scanners, security cameras, and independent monitors to oversee problem establishments.
It also enacted the following plan:
A new guideline booklet, NYPD and Nightlife Association Announce "Best Practices, was unveiled on October 18, 2007. This voluntary rule book included a 58-point security plan drafted in part by the New York Nightlife Association, was further recommended by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Speaker Christine Quinn. Security measures included cameras outside of nightclub bathrooms, a trained security guard for every 75 patrons and weapons searches for everyone, including celebrities entering the clubs. The new regulation resulted in stricter penalties for serving underage persons.
The Club Enforcement Initiative was created by the NYPD in response to what it referred to as "a series of high-profile and violent crimes against people who visited city nightclubs this year", mentioning the July 27 rape and murder of Jennifer Moore. One article discussed the dangers of police work and undercover investigations.
In August 2006, the New York City Council started initiatives to correct the problems highlighted by the deaths of Moore and St. Guillen. There was also discussions about electronic I.D. scanners. Quinn reportedly threatened to revoke the licenses of bars and clubs without scanners.
In September 2011, the NYPD Nightlife Association updated their Safety Manual Handbook. There is now a section on counterterrorism; this addition came after the planned terrorist attacks on certain bars and clubs worldwide.
Crime in New York City was high in the 1980s during the Mayor Edward I. Koch years, as the crack epidemic hit New York City, and peaked in 1990, the first year of Mayor David Dinkins's administration (1990–1993), but then began to decline; the number of murders fell from the 1990 peak to a level close to Koch's worst year of 1989 by Dinkins's final year of 1993. The decline accelerated dramatically during the first term of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (1994–1997), the number of murders falling by sixty percent, and continued to decline, though at much slower rates, during both his second term (1998–2001) and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's three terms (2002–2013).
Scholars differ on the causes of the precipitous decline in crime in New York City (which also coincided with a nationwide drop in crime which some have termed the "Great American Crime Decline"). In a 2007 paper, economist Jessica Reyes attributes a 56 percent drop in nationwide violent crime in the 1990s to the removal of lead (a neurotoxin that causes cognitive and behavioral problems) from gasoline. The Brennan Center for Justice has estimated that between 0% and 5% of the drop in crime in the 1990s may be attributed to higher employment; 5% to 10% of the drop may be attributed to income growth; and 0% to 10% of the drop from increased hiring of police officers.
The Brennan Centre has also stated that the introduction of "compstat" procedures, being a combination of targeted enforcement at crime hot spots and the imposition of greater managerial accountability on police command staff, is the only tactic which has led clearly to subsequent reductions in crime. As law professor Lawrence Rosenthal reported, this was introduced during Giuliani's first term as mayor, together with stop-and-frisk. Economists Steven Levitt and John J. Donohue III argue that the drop in crime in New York City, as in the United States generally, to the legalization of abortion following Roe v. Wade (see legalized abortion and crime effect).
The rates of most crimes, including all categories of violent crime, made consecutive declines from their peak in his first year, 1990, during the last 36 months of his four-year term. The 30-year upward spiral was ended and a trend of falling rates was initiated that continued beyond his term and accelerated under his successor. Despite the actual abating of crime, Dinkins was hurt by the perception that crime was out of control during his administration. Dinkins also initiated a hiring program that expanded the police department nearly 25%. The New York Times reported, "He obtained the State Legislature's permission to dedicate a tax to hire thousands of police officers, and he fought to preserve a portion of that anticrime money to keep schools open into the evening, an award-winning initiative that kept tens of thousands of teenagers off the street." Dinkins also proposed to create a civilian agency to investigate police misconduct. Police officers opposition to the proposal led to a 1992 police riot, at which Rudolph Giuliani addressed the crowd of officers who damaged cars, chanted racial slurs, and attacked journalists.
In Rudolph Giuliani's first term as mayor, the New York City Police Department, under Giuliani appointee Commissioner Bill Bratton, adopted an aggressive enforcement and deterrence strategy based on James Q. Wilson's Broken Windows research. This involved crackdowns on relatively minor offenses such as graffiti, turnstile jumping, and aggressive "squeegeemen", on the principle that this would send a message that order would be maintained and that the city would be "cleaned up".
At a forum three months into his term as mayor, Giuliani mentioned that freedom does not mean that "people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it".
Giuliani also directed the New York City Police Department to aggressively pursue enterprises linked to organized crime, such as the Fulton Fish Market and the Javits Center on the West Side (Gambino crime family). By breaking mob control of solid waste removal, the city was able to save businesses over $600 million.
In 1994, in one of his first initiatives, Bratton instituted CompStat, a comparative statistical approach to mapping crime geographically to identify emerging criminal patterns and chart officer performance by quantifying apprehensions. CompStat gave precinct commanders more power, based on the assumption that local authorities best knew their neighborhoods and thus could best determine what tactics to use to reduce crime. In turn, the gathering of statistics on specific personnel aimed to increase accountability of both commanders and officers. Critics of the system assert that it instead creates an incentive to underreport or otherwise manipulate crime data. The CompStat initiative won the 1996 Innovations in Government Award from Harvard Kennedy School. The Brennan Centre for Justice has stated that "compstat" was the only tactic which lead clearly to subsequent reductions in crime.
In 1996, Time magazine featured Bratton, not Giuliani, on its cover as the face of the successful war on crime in New York City. Giuliani forced Bratton out of his position after two years, in what was generally seen as a battle of two large egos in which Giuliani was unable to accept Bratton's celebrity.
Giuliani continued to highlight crime reduction and law enforcement as central missions of his mayoralty throughout both terms. These efforts were largely successful. However, concurrent with his achievements, a number of tragic cases of abuse of authority came to light, and numerous allegations of civil rights abuses were leveled against the NYPD. Giuliani's own deputy mayor, Rudy Washington, alleged that he had been harassed by police on several occasions. More controversial still were several police shootings of unarmed suspects, and the scandals surrounding the sexual torture of Abner Louima and the killing of Amadou Diallo. In a case less nationally publicized than those of Louima and Diallo, unarmed bar patron Patrick Dorismond was killed shortly after declining the overtures of what turned out to be an undercover officer soliciting illegal drugs. Even while hundreds of outraged New Yorkers protested, Giuliani staunchly supported the New York City Police Department, going so far as to take the unprecedented step of releasing Dorismond's "extensive criminal record" to the public, for which he came under wide criticism. While many New Yorkers accused Giuliani of racism during his terms, former mayor Ed Koch defended him as even-handedly harsh: "Blacks and Hispanics ... would say to me, 'He's a racist!' I said, 'Absolutely not, he's nasty to everybody'."
The amount of credit Giuliani deserves for the drop in the crime rate is disputed. He may have been the beneficiary of a trend already in progress. Crime rates in New York City started to drop in 1991 under previous mayor David Dinkins, three years before Giuliani took office. A small but significant nationwide drop in crime also preceded Giuliani's election, and continued throughout the 1990s. Two likely contributing factors to this overall decline in crime were federal funding of an additional 7,000 police officers and an improvement in the national economy. Many experts believe changing demographics were the most significant cause. Some have pointed out that during this time, murders inside the home, which could not be prevented by more police officers, decreased at the same rate as murders outside the home. Also, since the crime index is based on the FBI crime index, which is self-reported by police departments, some have alleged that crimes were shifted into categories that the FBI does not quantify.
According to some analyses, the crime rate in New York City fell even more in the 1990s and 2000s than nationwide and therefore credit should be given to a local dynamic: highly focused policing. In this view, as much as half of the reduction in crime in New York in the 1990s, and almost all in the 2000s, is due to policing. Opinions differ on how much of the credit should be given to Giuliani, to Bratton, and to Ray Kelly, who had previously served under Dinkins and criticized aggressive policing under Giuliani.
Among those crediting Giuliani for making New York safer were several other cities nationwide whose police departments subsequently instituted programs similar to Bratton's CompStat.
In 2005, Giuliani was reportedly nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to reduce crime rates in the city. The prize went instead to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency for their efforts to reduce nuclear proliferation.
Starting in 2005, under the mayoral tenure of Michael Bloomberg, New York City achieved the lowest crime rate among the ten-largest cities in the United States. Since 1991, the city has seen a continuous fifteen-year trend of decreasing crime. Neighborhoods that were once considered dangerous are now much safer. Violent crime in the city has dropped by three quarters in the twelve years ending in 2005 with the murder rate at its lowest then level since 1963 with 539 murders that year, for a murder rate of 6.58 per 100,000 people, compared to 2,245 murders in 1990. The murder rate continued to drop each year since then. In 2012, there were 414 murders, mainly occurring in the outlying, low income areas of NYC. In 2014, there were 328 murders, the lowest number since the introduction of crime statistics in 1963. Among the 182 U.S. cities with populations of more than 100,000, New York City ranked 136th in overall crime.
In 2006, as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's gun control efforts, the city approved new legislation regulating handgun possession and sales. The new laws established a gun offender registry, required city gun dealers to inspect their inventories and file reports to the police twice a year, and limited individual handgun purchases to once every 90 days. The regulations also banned the use and sale of kits used to paint guns in bright or fluorescent colors, on the grounds that such kits could be used to disguise real guns as toys. In April, along with Boston mayor Thomas Menino, Bloomberg co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns. A December 2013 press release by the group said the bipartisan coalition included over 1,000 mayors. As mayor, Bloomberg increased the mandatory minimum sentence for illegal possession of a loaded handgun, saying: "Illegal guns don't belong on our streets and we're sending that message loud and clear. We're determined to see that gun dealers who break the law are held accountable, and that criminals who carry illegal loaded guns serve serious time behind bars." He opposes the death penalty, saying he would "rather lock somebody up and throw away the key and put them in hard labor."
In July 2007, the city planned to install an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists called Lower Manhattan Security Initiative.
In 2007, New York City had 494 reported homicides, down from 596 homicides in 2006, and the first year since 1963 (when crime statistics were starting to be published) that this total was fewer than 500. though homicides rose (to 523) in 2008, they fell again in 2009 to 466, an almost fifty-year low. Homicides continued to decline, with the city reporting 414 in 2012 and only 333 in 2013.
Bill de Blasio was sworn in office as mayor on January 1, 2018, he was sworn in as mayor of New York.
Until 2018, crime under the de Blasio administration continued a generally downward trend. In January 2020 robberies were up 39% from the previous year, shootings were up 29% and car theft was up 72%. Likewise, February and March saw 20% increases in major index crimes. De Blasio said that the consecutive months of 20% increases had been caused by recent bail reforms. Some advocacy groups who support the bail reforms accused the NYPD of misclassifying non-index crimes to put pressure on politicians in Albany. While the cause remains a subject of debate, recent changes to stop and frisk may have also had an impact, a view that was supported by former police commissioner Raymond W. Kelly.
In June 2020, gun violence spiked to the highest levels seen in nearly 25 years. De Blasio responded that more officers would be on the streets:
Unlike the crime increases from earlier months, June also saw a spike in murders, up 134% over the previous year. August saw shootings more than double compared to the previous year.
The election of Eric Adams as mayor was widely seen as a response by the electorate to concerns about rising crime. In March 2024 Adams said violent crime on the subway was being driven by recidivism: "We don't have a surge in crime. We have a surge in recidivism." Assaults on police officers continued to increase. Adams attributed it to an "erosion of expectation of authority". Police officials blamed criminal justice reform efforts in general for failing to deter attacks on cops with alternatives to incarceration programs. According to Mike LiPetri "only about 8% of the arrest population for assault actually does any kind of jail".
The fatal shooting of police officer Jonathan Diller in March 2024 called into question the City's "Crime is down" narrative. The man who killed Officer Diller was a parolee with 21 prior arrests. Adams spoke from Jamaica Hospital after meeting Diller's wife: "It is the good guys against the bad guys".
Two of the most influential police commissioners of New York City, Raymond Kelly and William Bratton, helped to greatly reduce the city's crime rate. The New York Times has called both men "the city's most significant police leaders of the past quarter-century." However, New York City crime started to decline in 1991 under Lee Brown, the second Black police commissioner in history.
In December 1989, David Dinkins appointed Lee Brown as the 36th Police Commissioner of New York City, and the second Black police commissioner in the city's history. Crime peaked for the first time in NYC history in 1990, but starting in 1991, crime began to decrease under Brown's community policing policies implemented within the Department. Brown resigned in September 1992.
On October 16, 1992, David Dinkins appointed Raymond Kelly the 37th Police Commissioner of the City of New York. The national decline in both violent crime and property crime began in 1993, during the early months of Raymond Kelly's commissionership under Dinkins. At the time a firm believer in community policing, Kelly helped spur the decline in New York City by instituting the Safe Streets, Safe City program, which put thousands more cops on the streets, where they would be visible to and able to get to know and interact with local communities. As the 37th commissioner, he also pursued quality of life issues, such as the "squeegee man" that had become a sign of decay in the city. The murder rate in New York City had declined from its 1990 mid-Dinkins-administration historic high of 2,254 to 1,927, when Kelly left in 1994, and continued to plummet even more steeply under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg.
The decline continued when Kelly returned as 41st Commissioner under Mayor Bloomberg in 2002–2013. As commissioner of the NYPD under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Kelly had often appeared at outreach events such as the Brooklyn's annual West Indian Day Parade, where he was photographed playing the drums and speaking to community leaders. Bloomberg and Kelly, however, continued to place heavy reliance on the CompStat system, initiated by Bill Bratton and since adopted by police departments in other cities worldwide. The system, while recognized as highly effective in reducing crime, also puts pressure on local precincts to reduce the number of reports for the seven major crimes while increasing the number of lesser arrests.
Bloomberg and Kelly continued and indeed stepped up Mayor Giuliani's controversial stop-and-frisk policy, which is considered by some to be a form of racial profiling. In the first half of 2011, the NYC police made 362,150 such arrests, constituting a 13.5 percent increase from the same period in 2010, according to WNYC radio (which also reported that 84 percent of the people stopped were either black or Latino, and that "nine out 10 stops did not result in any arrest or ticket".) According to New York State Senator Eric Adams, "Kelly was one of the great humanitarians in policing under David Dinkins. I don't know what happened to him that all of a sudden his philosophical understanding of the importance of community and police liking each other has changed. Sometimes the expeditious need of bringing down crime numbers bring out the worst in us. So instead of saying let's just go seek out the bad guy, we get to the point of, 'Let's go get them all.' If Kelly can't philosophically change, then we need to have a leadership change at the top."
Under Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelly also revamped New York City's Police Department into a world-class counter-terrorism operation, operating in conjunction with the CIA. Prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks there were fewer than two dozen officers working on terrorism full-time; ten years later there were over 1,000. One of Kelly's innovations was his unprecedented stationing of New York City police detectives in other cities throughout the world following terrorist attacks in those cities, with a view to determining if they are in any way connected to the security of New York. In the cases of both the March 11, 2004, Madrid bombing and the July 7, 2005 London bombings and July 21, 2005 London bombings, NYPD detectives were on the scene within a day to relay pertinent information back to New York. An August 2011 article by the Associated Press reported the NYCPD's extensive use of undercover agents (colloquially referred to as "rakers" and "mosque crawlers") to keep tabs, even build databases, on stores, restaurants, mosques. and clubs. NYPD spokesman Paul Browne denied that police trawled ethnic neighborhoods, telling the AP that officers only follow leads. He also dismissed the idea of "mosque crawlers", saying, "Someone has a great imagination."
According to Mother Jones columnist Adam Serwer, "The FBI was reportedly so concerned about the legality of the NYPD's program that it refused to accept information that came out of it." Valerie Caproni, the FBI's general counsel, told the AP that the FBI is barred from sending agents into mosques looking for leads outside of a specific investigation and said the practice would raise alarms. "If you're sending an informant into a mosque when there is no evidence of wrongdoing, that's a very high-risk thing to do," she was quoted as saying. "You're running right up against core constitutional rights. You're talking about freedom of religion."
Under Mayor Bloomberg, Kelly's NYPD also incurred criticism for its handling of the protests surrounding the 2004 Republican National Convention, which resulted in the City of New York having to pay out millions in settlement of lawsuits for false arrest and civil rights violations, as well as for its rough treatment of credentialed reporters covering the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.
On March 5, 2007, it was announced that a Rikers Island inmate offered to pay an undercover police officer posing as a hit man to behead Kelly as well as bomb police headquarters in retaliation for the controversial police shooting of Sean Bell.
Bill Bratton became the chief of the New York City Transit Police in 1990. In 1991 the Transit Police gained national accreditation under Bratton. The department became one of only 175 law-enforcement agencies in the country and only the second in New York State to achieve that distinction. The following year it was also accredited by the State of New York, and by 1994, there were almost 4,500 uniformed and civilian members of the department, making it the sixth largest police force in the United States. Bratton had left the NYC Transit Police returning to Boston in 1992 to head the Boston Police Department, one of his long-time ambitions. In 1994, Bratton was appointed the 38th Commissioner of the NYPD by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. He cooperated with Giuliani in putting the broken windows theory into practice. He had success in this position and introduced the CompStat system of tracking crimes, which proved successful in reducing crime in New York City and is still in use today. A new tax surcharge enabled the training and deployment of around 5,000 new better-educated police officers, police decision-making was devolved to precinct level, and a backlog of 50,000 unserved warrants was cleared. Bratton resigned in 1996.
On December 5, 2013, New York City mayor-elect Bill de Blasio named Bratton as New York City's new Police Commissioner to replace Raymond Kelly after de Blasio's swearing-in on January 1, 2014. The New York Times reported that at Bratton's swearing-in on January 2, 2014, the new Police Commissioner praised his predecessor Raymond Kelly, but also signaled his intention to strike a more conciliatory tone with ordinary New Yorkers who had become disillusioned with policing in the city: "We will all work hard to identify why is it that so many in this city do not feel good about this department that has done so much to make them safe — what has it been about our activities that have made so many alienated?".
Howard Safir became Police Commissioner in April 1996 after the first resignation of William Bratton. Safir continued Bratton's crime-cutting initiatives and policies, and implemented his own initiative, Courtesy, Professionalism and Respect that has been plastered on every police car in NYC since 1997. Safir left office in August 2000, replaced by Bernard Kerik.
The boroughs of Queens and Staten Island have historically had lower crime rates compared to Brooklyn, The Bronx and Manhattan. Since 1985, the Bronx has consistently had the highest homicide and violent crime rate among the five boroughs.
With some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country, the Bronx, specifically the South Bronx, became noteworthy as a high-crime area in the later part of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1960s, White flight, landlord abandonment, a decline in city services, reduced investment, economic changes, changing demographics, and the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway (CBE) all contributed to the borough's decay.
The construction of expressways in the Bronx, especially the CBE within the South Bronx, divided several neighborhoods and displaced thousands of residents and businesses. The already poor and working-class neighborhoods were further disadvantaged by the decreasing property value and increasing vacancy rates. Racial tensions during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s further contributed to middle-class flight and the decline of many neighborhoods. By the late 1960s, the vacancy rate of homes in the South Bronx was the highest of any place in the city.
The early 1970s saw South Bronx property values continue to plummet to record lows, as the city experienced a fiscal crisis. Primarily, White flight led to abandonment and deterioration of large numbers of buildings. This, coupled with a stagnant economy and an extremely high unemployment rate, attracted increased social problems including the proliferation of street gangs and a large number of squatters. This had a domino effect, leading landlords of nearby apartment buildings to neglect their properties as well. Police statistics show that as the crime wave moved north across the Bronx, the remaining white tenants in the South Bronx (mostly elderly Jews) were preferentially targeted for violent crime by the influx of young, minority criminals because they were seen as easy prey. This became so common that the slang terms "crib job" (meaning how elderly residents were as helpless as infants) and "push in" (home invasion) were coined specifically in reference to them.
Moreover, South Bronx residents were reportedly burning down vacant properties, either for scrap or to get better housing, while some landlords were doing the same in order to collect the insurance money. Media attention brought the Bronx, especially its southern half, into common interest nationwide. The phrase "The Bronx is burning", attributed to Howard Cosell during a Yankees World Series game in 1977, refers to the arson epidemic caused by the total economic collapse of the South Bronx during the 1970s. During the game, as ABC switched to a generic helicopter shot of the exterior of Yankee Stadium, an uncontrolled fire could clearly be seen burning in the ravaged South Bronx surrounding the park. By the time of Cosell's 1977 commentary, dozens of buildings were being burned in the South Bronx every day, sometimes whole blocks at a time. The local police precincts – already struggling and failing to contain the Bronx's massive wave of drug and gang crime – had long since stopped bothering to investigate the fires, since there were too many to track.
The 1975 New York City fiscal crisis was succeeded by the New York City blackout of 1977, which triggered massive looting that bankrupted stores. By 1979, many Bronx neighborhoods went aflame and were turned into rubble. Apartment buildings were abandoned or sold to lesser landlords amid rapid urban decay. Its high schools became notorious as the city's worst, and it was struck by the crack epidemic. During the 1970s, the NYPD's 41st Precinct Station House at 1086 Simpson Street became known as "Fort Apache, The Bronx". By 1980, the 41st was renamed "The Little House on the Prairie", as two-thirds of the area's 94,000 residents had fled, and the station house was one of the few buildings that had not been abandoned or burnt down. In total, over 40% of the South Bronx was burned or abandoned between 1970 and 1980; 44 census areas lost more than 50% of their area to fires, and seven lost over 97% of their buildings to arson or abandonment. The appearance was frequently compared to that of a bombed-out and evacuated European city following World War II. One of the most drastic cases of this was Charlotte Street in Crotona Park East—the street had become so deteriorated that part of it was de-mapped in 1974. After President Jimmy Carter personally visited Charlotte Street in 1977, he ordered the head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to take steps to salvage the area.
Despite significant investment compared to the post-war period, many exacerbated social problems remain in many neighborhoods including high rates of violent crime, substance abuse, overcrowding, and substandard housing conditions. The Bronx has the highest rate of poverty in New York City, and the greater South Bronx is the poorest area.
Neighborhoods such as Brownsville, Canarsie, and East New York used to be majority Italian and Jewish, but have shifted into mostly Black and Hispanic communities. Between the 1950s and 1970s a demographic shift occurred, the borough lost almost 500,000 people, most of them White, and at the same time the crime rate in Brooklyn increased. Those residents moved to neighboring boroughs of Queens and Staten Island, in addition to suburban counties of Long Island and New Jersey.
In 1961, Alfred E. Clark of The New York Times referred to Bedford–Stuyvesant as "Brooklyn's Little Harlem". One of the first urban riots of the era took place there. Social and racial divisions in the city contributed to the tensions. In 1964, a race riot started in Harlem, Manhattan, after an Irish NYPD lieutenant, Thomas Gilligan shot and killed a black teenager named James Powell, who was only 15. The riot spread to Bedford–Stuyvesant, and resulted in the destruction and looting of many neighborhood businesses, many of which were Jewish-owned. Race relations between the NYPD and the city's black community strained as police were seen as an instrument of oppression and racially biased law enforcement.
On top of this, few black officers were present on the force. In predominantly black New York neighborhoods, arrests and prosecutions for drug-related crimes were higher than anywhere else in the city, despite evidence that illegal drugs were being used at the same rate in white communities. This further contributed to the problems between the white dominated police force and the black community. Race riots followed in 1967 and 1968 as part of the political and racial tensions in the United States of the era, aggravated by high unemployment among blacks, de facto segregation in housing, and the failure to enforce civil rights laws. This contributed to the New York City teachers' strike of 1968, when Brownsville's majority white teacher population clashed with the majority black residential population. Conversely, the mostly white population of Canarsie protested efforts at racial school integration in the early 1970s, which largely led to white flight in Canarsie by the 1980s.
Starting in the mid-19th century, the United States became a magnet for immigrants seeking to escape poverty in their home countries. After arriving in New York, many new immigrants ended up living in squalor in the slums of the Five Points neighborhood. By the 1820s, the area was home to many gambling dens and brothels, and was known as a dangerous place to go. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited the area and was appalled by the horrendous living conditions he saw there. The area was so notorious that it even caught the attention of Abraham Lincoln, who visited there in 1860 before his Cooper Union speech. The predominantly Irish Five Points Gang was one of the country's first major organized crime entities.
As Italian immigration grew in the early 20th century, many joined ethnic gangs. A prominent example is Al Capone, who got his start in crime with the Five Points Gang. The Mafia (also known as Cosa Nostra) first developed in the mid-19th century in Sicily, and spread to the East Coast of the United States during the late 19th century, following waves of Sicilian and Southern Italian emigration. Lucky Luciano established Cosa Nostra in Manhattan, and formed alliances with other criminal enterprises. This included the Jewish mob, which was led by Meyer Lansky, who was the leading Jewish gangster of that period. From 1920 to 1933, U. S. Prohibition helped create a thriving black market in liquor, which the Mafia was quick to capitalize on.
The borough experienced a sharp increase in crime during the post-war period. The murder rate in Manhattan hit an all-time high of 42 murders per 100,000 residents in 1979. Manhattan retained the highest murder rate in the city until 1985 when it was surpassed by the Bronx. Most serious violent crime has been historically concentrated in Upper Manhattan and the Lower East Side, though robbery in particular was a major quality-of-life concern throughout the borough. Through the 1990s and 2000s, crime in Manhattan plummeted in all categories versus historic highs.
Today crime rates in most of Lower Manhattan, Midtown, the Upper East Side, and the Upper West Side are consistent with other major city centers in the United States. However, crime rates remain high in the Upper Manhattan neighborhoods of East Harlem, Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, and NYCHA developments across the borough despite significant reductions. In more recent years there has been an increase in violent crime, particularly in Upper Manhattan and NYCHA developments.
Harlem, a large neighborhood within the northern section of the New York City borough of Manhattan, has historically had some of the highest rates of poverty and violent crime citywide. Although the rate of crime has decreased compared to historic highs of the early 1990s, high rates of crime are still prevalent in the neighborhood. Crime in Harlem is primarily related to illicit activities such as theft, robbery, drug trafficking and prostitution. Criminal organizations such as street gangs are responsible for a significant portion of crime, particularly violent crime. The leading cause of death among young black males in Harlem is homicide. According to a survey published in 2013 by Union Settlement Association, residents of East Harlem perceive crime as their biggest single concern. Harlem today maintains one of the highest violent crime rates in New York City. In 2021, the 25th Precinct had the second-highest rates of felony assault and robbery, the sixteenth-highest rate of rape, and the highest rate of murder out of the New York Police Department's 77 precincts.
The early days of Chinatown were dominated by Chinese "tongs" (now sometimes referred to as "associations")—a mix of clan associations, landsman's associations, political alliances (Kuomintang vs. Chinese Communist Party), and (more secretly) crime syndicates. The associations started to give protection from harassment due to anti-Chinese sentiment. Each of these associations was aligned with a street gang. The associations were a source of assistance to new immigrants, doing things such as giving out loans and helping to start businesses.
Until the 1980s, the portion of Chinatown east of the Bowery, considered part of the Lower East Side, had a higher proportion of non-Chinese residents than in Chinatown's western section. During the 1970s and 1980s, this area had deteriorating building conditions, including vacant lots and storefronts, with fewer businesses. It suffered from many violent crimes such as gang activities, robberies, burglaries and rape, as well as racial tensions with other ethnic groups. Female Chinese garment workers were especially targets of robbery and rape, with many leaving work together in groups to protect each other as they were heading home.
Similarly, crime in Chinatown increased due to the poor relations between Cantonese and Fuzhouese immigrants when the latter group started moving into the area in the 1980s and 1990s. Due to the Fuzhou immigrants having no legal status and an inability to speak Cantonese, many were denied jobs in Chinatown, and instead became criminals to make a living. There was a large amount of Cantonese resentment against Fuzhou immigrants arriving into Chinatown.
During the mid-to-late 1980s, Chinatown began to experience an influx of Vietnamese refugees from the Vietnam War. Since most of the Vietnamese could not speak Mandarin or Cantonese, which was solely used for most social services, they struggled to survive and lived on the fringes of the community. Eventually, many Vietnamese youth within the city started to form gang factions. Under the leadership of a wealthy Vietnamese immigrant named David Thai, who combined many separate gangs into one known as Born to Kill, Vietnamese youths began a violent crime spree in Chinatown – robbing, extorting, and racketeering – drawing much resentment from the Chinese community.
Washington Heights and Inwood, neighborhoods in Upper Manhattan, recorded a total of 103 murders in 1990. The crack epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s impacted the community especially hard. The 33rd precinct was established in the area in 1993. The violent crime rate remains higher than the city as a whole today despite a significant decline compared to the crack epidemic. Drug trafficking and human trafficking continue to be a major quality of life issues in the community.
The broken windows theory is a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signalling effect of urban disorder and vandalism on additional crime and anti-social behavior. The theory states that maintaining and monitoring urban environments in a well-ordered condition may stop further vandalism and escalation into more serious crime.
CompStat is the name given to the New York City Police Department's accountability process and has since been replicated in many other departments. CompStat is a management philosophy or organizational management tool for police departments, roughly equivalent to Six Sigma or TQM, and was not a computer system or software package in its original form. Through an evolutionary process, however, some commercial entities have created turnkey packages including computer systems, software, mobile devices, and other implements collectively assembled under the heading of CompStat. Instead, CompStat is a multilayered dynamic approach to crime reduction, quality of life improvement, and personnel and resource management. CompStat employs Geographic Information Systems and was intended to map crime and identify problems. In weekly meetings, ranking NYPD executives meet with local precinct commanders from one of the eight patrol boroughs in New York City to discuss the problems. They devise strategies and tactics to solve problems, reduce crime, and ultimately improve quality of life in their assigned area.
Law enforcement in New York City is carried out by numerous law enforcement agencies. New York City has the highest concentration of law enforcement agencies in the United States. As with the rest of the US, agencies operate at federal, state, and local (county and city) levels. However, New York City's unique nature means many more operate at lower levels. Many private police forces also operate in New York City. The New York City Police Department is the main police agency in the city.
The NYPD has come under scrutiny for its use of stop-and-frisk, implemented under Rudy Giuliani's tenure as mayor.
It is a practice of the New York City Police Department by which police officers stop and question hundreds of thousands of pedestrians annually, and frisk them for weapons and other contraband. The rules for stop, question and frisk are found in New York State Criminal Procedure Law section 140.50, and are based on the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Terry v. Ohio. About 684,000 people were stopped in 2011. The vast majority of these people were black or Hispanic. Some judges have found that these stops are not based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.
On October 31, 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit blocked the order requiring changes to the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk program and removed Judge Shira Scheindlin from the case. On November 9, 2013, the city asked a federal appeals court to vacate Scheindlin's orders. Bill de Blasio, who succeeded Bloomberg as mayor in 2014, has pledged to reform the stop-and-frisk program, and is calling for new leadership at the NYPD, an inspector general, and a strong racial profiling bill.