De Blasio Credits NYPD With Saving 29,000 Lives Since 1994

ONE POLICE PLAZA, MANHATTAN — At Bill Bratton's final monthly press conference on city crime trends, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the outgoing commissioner's tactics have saved the lives of nearly 29,000 New Yorkers over the past two decades.

According to NYPD statistics, 1,946 murders were recorded in New York in 1993. The following year, Bratton took over as Chief of Police, and the NYPD began using CompStat, a tool that informs its policing decisions, to collect computerized data on crime around the city.

In 2015, 352 murders were recorded in the city, the NYPD said. And through Aug. 28 of this year, a total of 227 murders had been recorded.

If nothing had changed after 1993, about 29,000 additional murders would have been recorded to date, de Blasio said.

"For 22 years, we've been moving in the right direction," the mayor continued, though he added the city still had "a lot more work to do" in order to make its residents safer — specifically citing the Monday shooting deaths of Tyreke Borel and Tiarah Poyau at this year's J'Ouvert parade in Crown Heights.

Even so, on Tuesday, Bratton said this summer was the safest in the CompStat era.

From June through August, the NYPD recorded 1,610 fewer crimes than during the same period last year, a decrease of 5 percent. During the summer of 1994, 73,463 more crimes were recorded than during this summer.

In August, the NYPD said it recorded a 9 percent drop in major crimes compared to the same month in 2015, including one fewer murder, 10 fewer rapes, 247 fewer robberies, 162 fewer assaults, 289 fewer burglaries, 22 fewer grand larcenies, and 23 fewer car thefts.

"From time to time, there will be a spike in certain crimes," Bratton said, "but we as a department have gotten very good at precision policing."

Through Aug. 28, the NYPD recorded 666 shootings claiming 798 victims, down from 769 shootings with 923 victims during that period in 2015 — an 81 percent decrease compared to the same period in 1993.

Dermot Shea, the NYPD's director of operations, said that transit crime is also down 1.7 percent this year.

Bucking those trends was crime committed at housing developments, which is up 6.6 percent so far this year, Shea said. About a third of that crime is domestic in nature, he said, a class of crime that has proven difficult for the NYPD to address.

Shea added, though, that the 33 homicides recorded on housing properties so far this year is the lowest number ever measured in the CompStat era.

[Editor's note: a previous version of this story incorrectly reported that 33 shootings had taken place at public housing properties so far this year. The NYPD said Tuesday that 33 homicides had taken place on housing properties.]

Top image courtesy of André Gustavo Stumpf/Flickr