Homicides in 2017 plunge to record low
THE NYPD’s gonna party like it’s 1952.
As the big ball dropped in Times Square, the NYPD reached a major milestone — ending the year with fewer than 300 homicides.
Unofficial numbers show that the NYPD had investigated 290 2017 homicides so far — a number the city hasn’t seen for nearly 70 years, officials said.
The last time the city saw a lower murder rate was 1951 — when the NYPD logged 243 killings.
“It is safe to say right now that New York hasn’t been like this since the 1950s,” Police Commissioner James O’Neill said on “Good Day New York” last month.
Cops investigated 45 fewer killings when compared to 2016, when detectives investigated 335.
Yet 2016’s figure still didn’t beat 2014’s, which saw a recordbreaking 333 homicides — the lowest number in modern times.
No murders were reported in the city all of Saturday or Sunday, cops said.
The latest killing was in the Bronx on Friday, when Teddy Gibson was found sprawled out in Hunts Point about 10:20 p.m.
The 2017 statistics represent a 61% drop from two decades ago, when there were 746 slayings — which was at the time considered a 30-year low.
The city typically saw between 300 and 400 murders annually in the post-WWII era, but those numbers started steadily climbing starting in 1961.
Murders peaked in 1990 with 2,245 homicides, which included the 87 lives lost in an inferno set by an arsonist at the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx.
Shootings are also down for 2017, officials said. As of Thursday, the NYPD investigated 784 shootings — 204 fewer than the 988 recorded this time in 2016. That’s a 21% drop, cops said.
O’Neill has long credited the drop in crime to the department’s neighborhood policing initiative, where cops are given specific sectors and are instructed to reach out to residents in the area.