By Willian K. RashBaum, The New York Times
The New York Police Department recorded 32 murders last month, the lowest number of killings in a one- month period since the city began tracking crime statistics on a monthly basis in 1962, officials said yesterday.
The record low came despite cuts in overtime earmarked to pay for additional quality-of-life patrols, and when many officers, away from their regular patrol duties, remained on guard at government buildings, bridges, tunnels and landmarks as part of counterterrorism efforts since Sept. 11, officials said.
Crime has declined steadily since Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly took over in January, and officials yesterday heralded the numbers and said they believed they could drive reported crime - which has dropped to record lows over the past 10 years - down even further.
“It’s extraordinary,” said the deputy commissioner for operations, Garry F. McCarthy, who oversees the department’s crime-reduction efforts and monitors the process, called Compstat, by which the department tracks statistics of reported crimes.
Commissioner McCarthy also pointed out that during two weeks last month, the weekly total of all recorded index crimes - murder, rape, robbery, grand larceny, car theft, assault and burglary - was the lowest it has been since the department began its intensive record- keeping under Compstat in 1994.
In fact, overall reported crime was down 8 percent as of Sunday, from 23,408 incidents for the first two months of 2001 to 21,520 for the same period this year, according to the most recent police figures. The 32 murders recorded last month represented a 29 percent decline from the 45 murders in February last year.
Murders have declined about 35 percent for the first two months of this year, from 101 last year to 65 this year, Mr. McCarthy said.
Mr. McCarthy cited the department’s continued emphasis on quality-of-life crimes, which Commissioner Kelly has stressed will be a touchstone of his crime-fighting strategies as he focuses on preventing and investigating terrorism as well.
Mr. McCarthy also credited a new violent-felony squad that he said has enabled the police to zero in on the people who commit most of the serious crimes in the city by identifying the city’s 100 worst criminals.
“We have very surgical, targeted enforcement against known violators,” he said, “because it’s a small percentage of the population that commits the vast majority of the serious crime.”
In addition, beginning this year, as part of the reorganization of the department’s intelligence division, precincts and other units have begun sharing information about people suspected of committing crimes, which is entered into a central database now available to officers and detectives throughout the department.
“So I think we’re working a lot smarter,” Mr. McCarthy said.
Compstat meetings are now also used to focus on how the department hunts for particular suspects. “We identify actual perpetrators,” Mr. McCarthy said, “who are wanted by a number of different bureaus and a number of different agencies, in some cases, at Compstat and we examine the hunt for them and push it up to the top of the pile.”
Thomas Reppetto, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, called the 35 percent reduction in murders for the first two months of the year “truly amazing” because it comes as murder rates in many other large cities around the country remain roughly static and despite a very mild winter, which often can mean more people on the street, and hence more crime.
“I’ve been in touch with other major cities and they tend to be about even,” Mr. Reppetto said. “It’s a major accomplishment. I think it has to be due to police operations. They have refined their strategies so they can do more with the resources” that they have.