The NYPD this month announced the fewest shootings and murders recorded through July in New York City’s history.
This is a remarkable accomplishment for a city that seemed on the verge of a major backslide after shootings and murders spiked in 2020 and 2021.
The striking thing, though, is that New York’s broader crime picture has not improved nearly as dramatically.
The contrast becomes more pronounced when one compares today’s crime levels with the pre-pandemic era: Many offenses remain considerably more prevalent than in 2019, even as murders and shootings have fallen to historic lows.
The most likely explanation: The NYPD has focused its limited resources on the worst and most prolific offenders, and gotten the biggest return on its investment.
And boosting those resources — i.e., expanding the rank-and-file — could extend those gains to less serious crimes.
To be sure, many other “major crime” categories (robbery, burglary, grand larceny) have also seen year-to-date declines.
But relative to what the city experienced through Aug.16, 2019, most major crime categories are still up.
That’s not what one would expect to see over a period in which murders and shootings are declining sharply.
In 2025, New York City experienced just 309 homicides — fewer than any other year since 2018.
Meantime, the city reported more “major” felony crimes than it did in 15 of the preceding 18 years, and 30,000 more than in 2018.
The above chart shows the percentage change in major crimes from 2019 (year-to-date through Aug. 16) to the same period this year. (Rapes are not included because its technical definition changed, resulting in data that can’t be compared fairly.)
So how exactly has the department managed to drive down homicides and shootings to record lows without making nearly as much progress on other crimes?
A recent paper by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Boston College and UCLA suggests an answer.
Using data from Chicago, they found “modest increases in sanction certainty for high-risk individuals can substantially reduce shooting victims citywide.”
Simply put, getting the relatively small number of offenders who pose the highest risk of serious violence off the street and deterring those in their close criminal networks achieves much bigger declines in serious violence than one might expect from targeting a much larger group of offenders who pose a lower risk of serious violence.
This is consistent with what pro-enforcement advocates have been saying for years.
Because serious crime is so highly concentrated within tight social networks of especially prolific offenders — what researchers call “tail risks” — communities get a bigger bang for their law-enforcement buck by meaningfully incapacitating those committing the largest shares of the costliest crimes.
“The concentration of shooting risk among a small number of high-rate offenders is not an empirical curiosity but a structural feature of urban gun violence,” the researchers write, adding that “crime control strategies targeting this tail yield disproportionate public safety returns.”
Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s NYPD seems to have delivered a real-world demonstration of that basic principle.
Identifying patterns in serious violence, as well as among the high-risk offenders behind them, has allowed the department to concentrate its limited resources where they are likely to have the greatest effect.
One of the most visible examples of that strategy is the department’s aggressive use of gang takedowns.
Last year, the department was responsible for 70 such busts.
The first 48, The Post reported, swept up 347 gang members — an average of seven offenders per takedown, implying the city likely took more than 500 gang members off the street in 2025 alone.
This month, the NYPD announced it had done another 25 busts through July.
As the NYPD has noted, these takedowns are not random. They are driven by intelligence the city carefully gathers — much of it through the Gun Violence Strategies Partnership, “a collaborative, multi-agency operation that brings together more than 30 federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies to combat gun violence,” per the NYPD.
The takeaway is clear and backed by new research: Relentlessly focusing on the most violent and high-rate offenders has undeniably produced impressive results.
Building on those results means acknowledging the NYPD’s resources are limited relative to a decade ago, when the department had nearly 10%, or 3,000, more officers.
Given how effective and efficient the NYPD has been in driving homicide and shooting numbers down to record lows, we have every reason to expect that a replenishment of its ranks will help push the rest of the city’s crime categories onto a similarly steep downward trajectory.
The cops are doing their job. It’s time for Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the City Council to do theirs.
Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the author of “Criminal (In)Justice.”
