By Jeremy Boyer
syracuse.com
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Crime in Syracuse is way down so far this year, compared with 2024 and the last five years.
It’s a trend that tracks with nationwide declines in cities, but Syracuse’s police chief also points to some day-to-day changes in local crime-fighting, like making cops get out of their cars and using “credible messengers” to talk to neighborhood kids after a shooting.
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But mostly, Chief Joe Cecile said, a downtick in gun violence that started in 2023 is freeing up cops to spend their time doing other community-focused work. It’s a snowball effect.
“If we’re not chasing shots fired all back and forth across the city, which we have in the past, it gives the officers the time to be proactive and address these other concerns, as well,” Cecile said.
Violent crime in Syracuse has been declining for the past two and a half years, but until 2025, property crime was heading in the opposite direction.
After three straight years of increases in property crimes like burglaries, thefts and stolen vehicles, the city has seen a significant 29% annual decline in these offenses through Aug. 11 . This is also 7% lower than the five-year average for property crime.
Total crimes in the city are down 27% so far this year, including an 18% decrease in violent offenses.
Through Aug. 11, there have been 44 people injured or killed by guns in Syracuse this year. That’s far below both the five-year average of 88 and the 10-year average of 81 through the same time period. Total shots fired calls, at 310 so far this year, are down 22% from a year ago.
Cecile said significant credit for the gun violence trend goes to the work coordinated by the Mayor’s Office to Reduce Gun Violence launched in 2022.
That office has worked with nonprofits to build a network of about 25 “credible messengers,” who are neighborhood residents who have built relationships with young people involved in or at risk of becoming involved in violent crime. Some, but not all, credible messengers have criminal histories themselves. They must go three to five years without getting into trouble in order get hired.
The messengers work with nonprofit groups that provide mentoring, job training and mental health counseling services. And they also work behind-the-scenes when there is a shooting to try to prevent retaliatory acts of violence.
The gun violence prevention office is run by Lateef Johnson-Kinsey. An example of the type of on-the-ground work he and partner organizations do took place after the fatal shooting of a 22-year-old on Westmoreland Avenue in June. A team of credible messengers and service providers blanketed the neighborhood a few days later to engage with young people who live there.
“We all came together, and I think we showed a sense of unity as a group of community violence intervention organizations to say, ‘Hey, we’re here for you. We know you lost somebody,’” he said. “I think when that doesn’t happen, they say ‘I feel like nobody cares or hears me. I’m gonna do what I gotta do.’ But we went right out there and met right with the players, guys from that area, and talked to them.”
Most of those interactions are one-on-one and spontaneous, which is the only way to reach the people most in need of intervention, Johnson-Kinsey said.
“If we say, ‘Let’s meet at the Southwest (Community Center) and have a meeting, they ain’t coming,” he said. “You gotta go right to where they are. They’re outside. You gotta go out.”
Johnson-Kinsey also works closely with the police department, discussing hot spots to target for intervention work and specific people who might be good candidates for contact by a credible messenger. The gun violence prevention office has faced scrutiny for a struggle to get participation in a program that tries to help gang members turn their lives around with job skills training and therapy, plus paid internships if they stay out of trouble.
But the police chief said the work of the credible messenger program in the streets has definitely had an impact.
“The stuff he’s doing behind the scenes with getting people to put the guns down, it is working,” Cecile said of Johnson-Kinsey.
Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh echoed that observation, and noted that Johnson-Kinsey’s most impactful contribution has been to bring together the entities who have been trying to help curtail gun violence for many years.
“We had numerous disparate organizations working on mostly the same issues, maybe some different focus areas, different demographics, but out there with very little accountability,” he said. “Lateef has brought a level of organization to community violence intervention and the involved organizations that simply never existed.”
For Cecile, that work allows officers to engage in pro-active police work that also contributed to reduced violent crime, which in turn eventually feeds reductions in non-violent crimes.
The chief said the department’s three captains give their patrol teams detailed guidance before every shift that’s based on their own analysis of data and hearing from the neighborhoods.
“These captains are some of the best I’ve ever seen in my 40-year career at motivating officers to be proactive to go out there and get ahead of the crime, not wait for the crime to occur,” he said.
One of the SPD initiatives started last year that has proven especially effective is a requirement for officers to spend time walking their beats instead of patrolling the full shift in a vehicle. The department uses data to pinpoint hotspots where officers should get out of the car.
“They’ll stop three times during their shift, get out of their cars and walk for 20 minutes, engaging with business owners, residents looking around to see if they can figure out why this trend is occurring,” Cecile said.
Positive crime trends are not unique to Syracuse, but the city’s rate of decline in multiple categories is outpacing the nation, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, which analyzes crime data in large cities:
- Homicides were down 17% nationally in the first half of the year, compared with a 33% decrease in Syracuse.
- Aggravated assaults dropped 10% nationally and 22% in Syracuse.
- Motor vehicle theft was 25% lower nationwide and 52% lower in Syracuse.
Walsh and Cecile both emphasized that they are not taking a victory lap in highlighting the improved crime trends. Work to improve crime levels must continue, they said.
But they also believe it’s important to bring awareness to what the data is showing. People tend to believe crime is always up because offenses get reported in the news and social media commenters fuel the negative perceptions.
“In no way does any of this conversation or positive discussion around crime reduction minimize the impact that it’s had on people that have been victims of crime,” Walsh said. “And we ground ourselves with that all of the time. I’ve said from day one, one murder in this city is one too many, and the goal is always to do better.”
Walsh is also mindful that crime in cities has come under increased attention from President Donald Trump, who this week instituted a federal takeover of policing in Washington, D.C., despite lower crime rates there the past year and half.
The Syracuse mayor hopes that instead of sending troops into cities without clear emergencies, the federal government steps up to continue funding the crime reduction initiatives that have worked in Syracuse and other areas.
“We have seen investments from the federal government, state government, for all these programs that we’re talking about,” Walsh said. “Resources matter. A lot of those investments happened in recent years. I think we’re seeing the result of that.”
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