City Touts Lowering Crime Statistics in New Commissioner James O'Neill's First Briefing

ONE POLICE PLAZA, NY — Mayor Bill de Blasio and new NYPD Police Commissioner James O'Neill on Monday credited targeted policing efforts and the department's expansion of community policing with New York City's continued overall reduction in crime.

The city recently finished its safest September since 1993, when the Compstat crime tracking system was implemented, according to official NYPD statistics.

A total of 1,163 fewer major crimes were recorded during the month than during September 2015, police said, including 220 fewer robberies, 338 fewer burglaries and 176 fewer vehicle thefts.

During September, 32 murders were recorded, two fewer than during the same month last year, along with 27 fewer rapes, 89 fewer felonious assaults and 311 fewer grand larcenies.

Domestic crimes remain a point of particular difficulty, according to Dermot Shea, the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Operations, adding that they were up between 2 and 3 percent in September compared to 2015. Of the 10 homicides recorded last week, Shea said, five were domestic in nature, while several are believed to have involved individuals violating orders of protection.

Shootings also proved an outlier. A total of 108 were recorded during this September, compared to 98 during the same month last year.

Shea linked the additional gunplay to the 103rd and 113 precincts, two adjacent precincts in Queens, and to Canarsie and Flatbush in Brooklyn.

In both areas, the crimes are gang-related, Shea said. However, he said that while it was more localized in Queens, gunfire "spreads like a cancer" in South Brooklyn, and can erupt wherever rival gangs come in contact with each other.

That said, overall gun crime continues to fall. Through Sept. 25, 763 shootings with 913 victims were recorded city-wide, according to official police statistics, compared to 869 shootings with 1,033 victims during the same period last year.

De Blasio said the crime reductions had taken place even as the NYPD had stopped and searched 97 percent fewer people this year than during 2011. As another example, the NYPD said that in 2011, the northern Brooklyn precincts recorded 110,000 stops and searches, while so far this year, about 1,000 had taken place.

De Blasio said that reality disproved "the misinformation we heard" during the first presidential debate, during which Republican candidate Donald Trump defended stop-and-frisk while incorrectly claiming that murders were up in New York City.

The mayor and police brass emphasized that the NYPD was better targeting those most responsible for crime. Stops and searches remain "an important part of what police officers do," O'Neill said, so long as the tactic is used correctly.

He said the stops that are taking place yield better results. From 2011 to 2014, the chief said, stops typically found illegal activity between 1.5 percent and 3 percent of the time, whereas from 2014 through the present, those numbers had undergone a "tripling."

The NYPD also said that assaults on officers are up this year, suggesting that could be the result of members of the force directly engaging the most dangerous members of the public.

As he has in recent months, de Blasio made a point to praise the NYPD's community policing model, which will be in more than 50 percent of precincts by the end of this year. The mayor said he routinely asks cops whether they are "proactively hearing from community members" about whether it's working. "They uniformly say yes," de Blasio said of the officers, adding that improving police-community relations results in better police intelligence and more responsive policing.

NYPD Chief of Department Carlos Gomez said that overall crime is down 2.5 percent in precincts with community policing, with robberies down 8 percent, shootings down 8 percent and murders down 3 percent.

In order to better quantify how happy police officers are with their jobs, and how the public feels about the NYPD, the department plans to begin conducting broad surveys of both. O'Neill said that effort will be "done scientifically" and "should be out shortly."

Photo Credit: NYC Mayor's Office