NYC’s Miracle Continues

With the New Year just weeks away, the Police Department announced Monday that the city’s on track for fewer than 300 murders in 2017 — the lowest total since the 1950s. Credit for New York’s historic crime drop goes to the entire NYPD for the last quartercentury, and to the politicians and citizens who’ve supported it.

Through Sunday night, preliminary stats show 263 homicides in the city this year, down 51 from the same period in 2016, a 17 percent drop. Shootings are down 23 percent; major crimes, 5.5 percent.

The tide began to turn in the early ’90s, when City Council Speaker Peter Vallone Sr. worked with Mayor David Dinkins to boost the force in the Safe Streets, Safe City law.

Then Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Commissioner Bill Bratton launched a revolution that would sweep the nation, with Comp Stat meetings to target precinct-level crime spikes and proactive Broken Windows policing to stop crime before it happened.

Commissioner Ray Kelly then kept crime dropping for 12 long years, despite budget pressures that reduced the force and the urgent post-9/11 need to divert major resources to anti-terrorism work.

To his credit, Mayor de Blasio didn’t change course (though things looked dicey in his first year). He wisely brought Bratton back, and heeded his advice.

And now the success has continued under Commissioner James O’Neill, whose “neighborhood policing” initiative seems to have made the difference even as de Blasio’s legal settlements and City Council action make cops’ jobs harder.

As O’Neill has emphasized, public support for the NYPD is crucial to this miracle — as is the daily work of all the men and women of the nation’s most professional police force.

“It’s remarkable,” O’Neill said. “To have a year like we’re having this year, and we had last year, it’s truly an amazing accomplishment.”

Let’s all help the NYPD keeps it up.