Fall Off To Bloody Start As Murders Jump In NYC, Stats Show

NEW YORK — An uptick in murders has gotten fall off to a bloody start in New York City, new crime statistics show.

The NYPD recorded 29 killings last month and 13 so far in October, Chief of Crime Control Strategies Lori Pollock said Tuesday. That's up from 28 slayings in September of last year and just seven at the start of October 2018, she said.

Those murders are among 250 committed in the city so far this year — a figure that includes Saturday's killings of four homeless people in Chinatown, according to the police department. That's a slight increase from 249 murders at the same point last year.

Guns have been the cause of a majority — 54 percent — of the city's murders this year, Pollock said. Cops have also recorded 627 shootings so far this year, up about 4 percent from the same period in 2018, the chief said.

The jump in gunplay has come despite a record-low number of shootings in September, police officials say. There were 67 recorded last month — the lowest number for any September on record and four fewer than the same month in 2018, Pollock said.

"While crime in New York City remains down thanks to the tireless work of the men and women of the police department working in close partnership with community members, we are focused on violent crime and the persistence of gun violence," NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill said in a statement.

Manhattan in particular has seen 32 more shootings so far this year, "primarily driven by marijuana, narcotics (and) gang violence," Pollock said. The spike has been concentrated in the borough's housing developments, which have seen 33 shootings compared to 18 last year, she said.

Cops say they took more than 300 guns off the streets last month, a third more than in 2018. And police have arrested or identified suspects in nearly two-thirds of this year's murder cases, Pollock said

The city has seen an overall drop this year in major crimes, which include murder, rape, robbery, burglary, felony assault, grand larceny and auto thefts, the NYPD says. Nearly 70,000 major crimes were reported through September, 2.6 percent fewer than this time last year, according to the police department

But major crimes jumped 1.6 percent in the month of September thanks to sizeable spikes in rapes, robberies and auto thefts, NYPD figures show.