Last month marked the safest March since New York City began computerized crime-tracking — even though there was a 20-plus percent surge in shooting incidents, the NYPD said Tuesday.
Major crimes dropped an overall 6.2 percent compared to March 2018, with reductions in all seven categories, officials said.
NYPD Chief of Crime Control Strategies Lori Pollock said the crime rate dipped to “all-time low” for March, as did the numbers for murders, robberies, burglaries and auto thefts.
Pollock also said the robbery number was “a record for any month in the CompStat era,” which began when the NYPD in 1994 started using computers to track and fight crime.
But officials acknowledged an alarming increase in shooting incidents — characterized as any in which someone is hit by gunfire — that Chief of Department Terence Monahan blamed on Brooklyn gang members. These incidents are categorized as those in in which at least one person is hit by gunfire.
“I’m not going to mention the names of the gangs and give them publicity, but these are gang-related incidents in the [public-housing] developments,” he said at a news conference in East New York.
Pollock also noted that 38 percent of the murders in March were gang-related.
Mayor de Blasio said, “The bigger trend here is unmistakable: the continued driving down of crime in this city.”