NYC Rape Reports See 2nd Decline In 18 Months

NEW YORK — The number of rapes in New York City fell for just the second time in more than a year last month, police statistics show.

The NYPD recorded 154 rapes in March, down 3.8 percent from 160 in March 2018. That followed a 2.2 percent decrease in December, when 132 rapes were reported compared with 135 in December 2017, according to an NYPD press release.

Slight as it was, December's drop ended a 15-month streak of year-over-year increases amid the advent of the #MeToo movement to pull back the curtain on sexual assault and harassment. August 2017 was the last month before December in which the city saw fewer reported rapes than in the prior year.

"We are cautiously optimistic, as it is too soon to tell what the reduction in the rape number means," Lori Pollock, the NYPD's chief of crime control strategies, said at a news conference Tuesday.

March's decrease appears to be driven by a drop in the number of reported rapes that happened in previous years. That was true for 40 cases last month, compared with 50 in March 2018, NYPD figures show. Eleven of the older incidents reported in March happened at least five years ago, according to the numbers.

But the number of rapes that happened this year rose to 114 from 110 in March 2018, the statistics show. And domestic rapes accounted for nearly half of all of last month's rape investigations, Pollock said.

Police officials had attributed the sustained spike in rapes to increased reporting and to their efforts to encourage reporting among survivors, such as an ad campaign launched last April.

But sexual crimes are still underreported nationally. About 40 percent of rapes or sexual assaults were reported to the police in 2017, the lowest rate among all violent crimes, according to the Department of Justice's criminal victimization report for that year.

The number of rapes in the city still rose 9.5 percent in the first three months of year, with 438 compared to 400 in the same period last year, NYPD figures show. But last month's drop came alongside year-over-year decreases in every other major crime — murder, robbery, burglary, felony assault, grand larceny and auto theft — a feat not achieved since August 2017, Pollock said.

Police recorded just 16 murders last month, the fewest for any March and a 27.3 percent drop from the same month last year, NYPD officials said. The number of robberies fell 6.7 percent to 872, the lowest figure for any month since the Police Department started using its CompStat system, according to Pollock.

"The day in day out hard work of the men and women of the NYPD across every community continues to drive crime down citywide," Police Commissioner James O'Neill said in a statement.