SAFEST NY FEB. EVER

City has historic low- crime wave

The city just had its safest February in the last 25 years — including nine days without a single shooting, police announced Wednesday.

The seven major crime categories dropped a combined 9.7 percent — from 7,339 to 6,630 — during the month, compared with the same period in 2016.

Those same index crimes are down 2.8 percent for the year to date compared to last year.

There was a bump in murders from 18 to 20 in February, but five of them took place in years past and had to be reclassified.

They included the death of Detective Steven McDonald, who was shot in Central Park in 1986 but succumbed to that injury this year, cops said.

Shootings fell from 62 to 40 in February — with nine full days of no shootings, officials boasted.

“Our neighborhood policing continues to play a critical role in fighting crime, by strengthening relationships between our communities and the police who protect them,” NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill said at a press conference at the 114th Precinct station house in Astoria, Queens.

“In reality, it’s only a very small percentage of people who are driving the bulk of violent crime,” O’Neill said. “With precision policing, we’re identifying those people, those groups, small gangs and crews, and we’re taking them down.”

Shootings and the number of shooting victims are down so far this year, compared with the same period in 2016. Shootings dropped 13.5 percent, from 111 to 96. The number of shooting victims fell 23.4 percent, from 137 to 105.

Officials also pointed out nearly 2 percent decreases in housing and transit crimes citywide in 2017 over 2016.

Deputy Commissioner of Operations Dermot Shea called the NYPD a ship that “is not easy to turn, but once it’s headed in a direction, we have a lot of momentum in our crime-fighting efforts.”

He took a look back at crime-fighting in the city.

“When we looked at shooting incidents in 1994, we were looking at 300400 a month, sometimes close to 500 a month,” he recalled “We recorded 40 this February. That’s the lowest number of any month in those nearly 25 years that we’ve recorded in New York City.”