City Marches to crime low

Crime in New York dropped in all seven major categories in March, helping push the city’s overall crime rate to an alltime low for any quarter in at least 25 years, the NYPD said Tuesday.

Every reported index crime — murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny auto — fell last month compared with March 2018. Overall crime was down 6.2%, making it the lowest rate for any March since 1994, when the police started tracking crimes using the CompStat system.

Transit crime slid 6% in March compared with last year, while housing crime was down 1% for the month, statistics showed.

But while the number of total crimes was down 7.3% for the first quarter of the year, murders, rapes and shooting incidents increased from January through March compared with the same period last year, the NYPD said.

Murders were up 15% — 69 compared with 60 in 2018. Reported rapes jumped nearly 10% through March, 438 versus 400 last year. And shooting incidents increased 6%, with 150 so far this year compared with 141 in 2018.

“We saw an uptick in homicides, we’ve got more work to do, but it’s good to see that that number has started to come down in a real way and that real progress is being made,” Mayor de Blasio said at a news conference alongside NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill and other top police brass.

The department credited a focus on policing precincts in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn where violent crimes have outpaced others for last month’s downturn. And the NYPD added more cops to several precincts in north Brooklyn where gang violence has been the most prevalent this year.

But Chief of Department Terence Monahan railed against repeat offenders who get bailed out and commit more felonies.

As an example, Monahan cited a suspect who was busted last April for gun possession, made bail, was arrested for the same crime in October, made bail again, then was robbed in February, setting in motion “two retaliatory shootings based upon him being robbed.”

Then, on March 21 the same man was arrested in a stolen car while fleeing police and is back on the streets again.

“These are a small amount of individuals who are out on the streets — it is not a lot of people — but these are the ones who show up consistently in the violence we are seeing,” Monahan said.

O’Neill said he hoped proposed changes to bail laws would allow judges to consider how dangerous a suspect is when setting bail.

“It’s going to take … more than just the NYPD. It’s got to be the prosecutors,” O’Neill said.