Murders Spiked 50 Percent In NYC Last Month, Police Say

NEW YORK — The NYPD has recorded a huge spike in murders at the start of this year, prompting police officials to send extra cops to four of the city's most violent precincts.

The city had seen 52 murders this year through the end of February, up nearly 37 percent from 38 in the same period last year, according to NYPD statistics released Monday. Two dozen of those slayings happened just last month, a 50 percent increase from 16 in February 2018, the figures show.

Brooklyn has been a hotbed of violence, with 24 of the year's murders and 12 — or half — of February's killings occurring in the borough, police officials said. Gang-related murders have accounted for 30 percent of the city's total, while 23 percent were domestic and 10 percent comprised drug- or narcotics-related slayings, Chief of Crime Control Strategies Lori Pollock said.

"Every one of us looks at each individual homicide as a human life," Mayor Bill de Blasio said. "It is our obligation when we see any kind of negative activity to do something about it."

The spike has come after the city ended 2018 with 289 killings, marking the second straight year with fewer than 300 murders — a milestone previously not reached since the early 1950s.

NYPD brass laid out a five-point plan on Monday to help beat back the trend. The Police Department will send at least eight additional cops to four precincts that have seen "pockets of violence," Chief of Department Terence Monahan said: Manhattan's 34th, The Bronx's 43rd, Brooklyn's 79th and Queens's 113th.

Those precincts have seen seven murders and 18 shootings so far this year, Monahan said, up from three murders and nine shootings in the same time last year.

The extra cops "will be deployed by the precinct executive officer at highly visible locations and at critical times when and where this violence has occurred," Monahan said, adding that deployments will be adjusted based on a weekly evaluation of which precincts are driving violence.

Police will also work more closely with the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office to more effectively prosecute gun violence, officials said.

While Brooklyn saw a historic drop in crime last year along with the rest of the city, the borough's prosecutors only win about half of the gun cases that go to trial there, according to DA Eric Gonzalez. Gonzalez's office will talk with the NYPD and the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice to ensure that both cops and prosecutors make gun cases as strong as they can be, officials said.

"Each one of these cases, they have to be strengthened to every measure possible in terms of providing the evidence that a jury would need to convict someone beyond reasonable doubt," Gonzalez said.

The Police Department will also build on a pilot program launched about four months ago to intensively investigate any domestic violence case that involves a gun, Monahan said. It was started as a result of last year's 27 domestic violence shootings, 19 of which led to a murder, police officials said.

Cops recovered 66 guns from homes with domestic violence reports last year and have nabbed another 14 this year, Pollock said. While 12 of this year's murders have been the result of domestic violence, none of those has involved a gun, police officials said.

The other two planks of the NYPD's plan are an expansion of its Ceasefire program, which aims to give young New Yorkers an alternative to gangs; and the start next month a new program called "Re-EntryStat" to prevent people released from prison from becoming the perpetrators or victims of crimes.

The spike in murders comes despite a reported 8.6 percent drop this year through the end of February in the most serious crimes: murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and auto thefts.

The city saw 6,056 of those crimes in February, down 10.8 percent from 6,792 in the same month last year, according to the NYPD.

Each one of those categories saw year-over-year drops except for murder and rape, the latter of which has seen sustained increases. There were 133 rapes reported last month, up 9 percent from last February, NYPD statistics show.