By Thomas Tracy
New York Daily News
NEW YORK CITY — Violent crime in the city dropped this past summer at a time when cops usually brace for a jump in mayhem, police said Wednesday.
The department saw a 28% drop in shootings and a 19% drop in murders in July and August when compared with the same two months last year, according to NYPD statistics.
The not-so-cruel summer comes as crime continues to drop in the city, NYPD Police Commissioner Edward Caban said Wednesday.
“New York City is the safest big city in the nation,” Caban said “We will continue to drive overall crime even lower. This is happening at a time when historically crime often spikes.”
Cops investigated 192 shootings in July and August, 76 fewer than the 268 recorded last summer, cops said. Detectives also probed 61 homicides, 15 fewer than the summer before.
The NYPD did record 4,775 assaults in the five boroughs this summer, 10 more than last summer, cops said.
Since the beginning of the year, cops have seen drops in five of the seven crime categories they track in their CompStat system. Crime reductions were seen in homicides, rapes, robberies, burglaries and grand larcenies, or non-violent thefts of $1,000 or more.
Cops also saw a 5% uptick in assaults this year and a whopping 18% jump in car thefts, spurred on mostly by a viral TikTok challenge that shows teenagers how easy it is to steal Kias and Hyundais.
Fearing an uptick in violent crime during the hottest months of the year, the NYPD put together a Summer Violence Reduction Plan where the department put more cops in “deployment zones” where violent crime historically occurred, cops said.
By the end of the summer, overall crime in the deployment zones dropped by 8% and shootings dropped by 23%, cops said.
Police release CompStat crime data every week for the seven days ending on Sunday. Instead of comparing months directly, the data measures 28-day periods. So the data police released covering the 28 days leading up to July 30 omits a total of three days, at the beginning and end of the month.
As crime dropped, arrests increased. Officers cuffed 35,429 people since January, the most for any eight-month period since 1999, police said.
The summer did have its share of headline-grabbing violence.
Out of the 104 shootings in July, 11 of them, or 11%, took place during one bloody 91/2-hour span between 11 p.m. on July 4 and 8 a.m. on July 5, cops said. Police also counted two homicides that night.
On Aug. 13, a panhandler viciously stabbed a man who declined to give him money outside Manhattan’s Herald Square subway station, leaving the victim seriously wounded, cops said. The panhandler, David Trotman, was arrested for the attack.
Later in the month, hot-headed parolee Derrick Williams was arrested for fatally stabbing a Bronx couple and wounding the couple’s friend in a crazed fight sparked when Williams groped one of the two women, cops said.
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