In the first three months of 2025, New York City recorded the fewest shootings of any first quarter since the Police Department began recording crime statistics in 1994, Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced on Thursday.
There were 140 shootings in the city, a 23 percent decrease from the same period in 2024, according to Police Department figures.
The drop came amid a wider decline in most major crimes since the start of this year, Commissioner Tisch said. The seven major felonies recorded by the department fell overall by 11 percent, with reductions in all five boroughs.
The statistics provide a counterpoint to accusations by members of the Trump administration that the city, and specifically its transit system, is rife with crime.
“Anyone who thinks this city is in chaos, they just don’t know this city,” Mayor Eric Adams said during a news conference at police headquarters on Thursday. “New York City remains the safest big city in America, bar none. The numbers prove that.”
Crime reached record lows before the pandemic and then spiked afterward. Now, it is receding again.
According to the data, there were only 63 murders in the city in the first quarter of 2025, the second lowest ever recorded in the first three months of a year. Other major crimes, including robbery and grand larceny, also declined across the city, she said.
Felony assaults, which have remained persistently high in the past year, dropped 2.7 percent to 6,361 from 6,535 in the same period last year. In 2024, there were 29,417 felony assaults, the highest number in at least 24 years.
Commissioner Tisch credited the declines in part to the department’s focus on policing in “Violence Reduction Zones,” areas with historically high concentrations of crime, including 125th Street in Manhattan, downtown Flushing in Queens and East New York in Brooklyn. The “hyperlocal” deployment of officers to these areas has helped reduce crime, she said, citing a 25 percent drop in major crimes across these zones.
“This work makes our neighborhoods and the people who live and work in them, safer,” she said.
Major crimes on the subway also fell by 18 percent from the same period last year, police said. And, for the first time since 2018, there have been no murders in the transit system since the start of the year.
The decline comes just weeks after the Trump administration in a letter threatened to withhold federal funding from the transit network if the Metropolitan Transportation Authority did not meet a series of demands related to crime in the system.
Commissioner Tisch said a recent deployment of officers on subway platforms and on trains have helped bring down crime rates.
Despite the improvements, a few crime categories have seen increases, police said. Rapes rose by 20 percent in the first quarter, according to data. The increase, police said, is partly because of recent legislation that expanded the definition of sexual assault in New York. Many of the reported incidents occurred in previous years, police said.
Crime among minors also rose, police said. The number of shooting victims under 18 rose 133 percent this year compared with 2018, and gun arrests are up 94 percent among those under the age of 18 in the same period.
Maia Coleman is a reporter for The Times covering the New York Police Department and criminal justice in the New York area. More about Maia Coleman
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