After a woman was raped at knife point in Central Park over the weekend, the police said on Monday that they had stepped up patrols of the park as the search for her attacker continued.
The 39-year-old woman told the police that she was jogging on the east side of the park near East 66th Street shortly before 8:30 p.m. on Saturday when a man dressed in black approached her brandishing a knife. He dragged her into a wooded area, raped her and ran off, the police said.
On Monday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked about the crime at an unrelated news conference at the Charles A. Dana Discovery Center in the northern section of the park bordering Harlem. “What happened to this survivor is horrific,” he said. “This is something that no one should have to endure. We know that every New Yorker should be able to walk anywhere in our city at any time of day and they should be safe.”
The woman was taken to a hospital for treatment, the police said. Her assailant was wearing a black sweatshirt and black sweatpants and carrying a black backpack, officials said.
The attack is the latest episode in the park that has raised concerns about safety. A 63-year-old woman who lived in the park was killed there last month, and a 32-year-old woman riding her bicycle was hit in the head and robbed by three men who took off with her AirPods on Oct. 18.
Given the tens of millions of visits the park receives each year, serious crime remains relatively rare there. The total number of robberies, felony assaults, sex crimes and murders so far this year is about 55, roughly the same as at this point last year and slightly lower than at this point in 2024, according to statistics the police released on Monday. The police did not immediately offer details on Monday about the increased patrols.
Saturday’s rape was the fifth recorded in the park this year. The police said they had made arrests in three of those attacks. During all of last year, there were three rapes.
The attack also occurred a week before the TCS New York City Marathon, which draws thousands of runners to the city’s green spaces for practice. The marathon passes through the park, and the course comes within a few hundred feet of where the woman was attacked.
“We were sad to hear of this horrible incident in what is normally a safe public space,” Crystal Howard, a spokeswoman for the New York Road Runners, the nonprofit that organizes the marathon, said in a statement. “We take the safety of our community seriously and work closely with law enforcement year-round to protect runners, spectators, volunteers and staff alike.”
On its website, the organization advises runners not to jog alone or at night, but to stay in pairs or groups, in well-lit areas around other people, and to avoid headphones.
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Katherine Marroquin, the cyclist who was attacked last week, said the city should do more to make the park safer. “They’re not doing a good job if that happened to me on a Sunday night and somebody else got raped on a Saturday,” she said.
Emma Goldberg contributed reporting.
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