By Hellen Zaboulani
For the first time since 2016, New York City’s annual homicide total has surpassed 300. The spike in violence has been propelled by gang violence, two quadruple killings, and an oddly high number of bookkeeping readjustments.
Through Dec. 22, the city counted 311 homicides, compared with 290 through the same time period last year. This is the second straight year of higher homicides, following NYC’s attained modern-era low of 292 homicides in 2017. However, this year’s total is partially skewed by an irregular number of deaths left over from years past and accounted for only now.
As reported by VIN News, this year’s figures include 27 deaths from before 2019, which were not classified as homicides by the city’s medical examiner until this year. The police department said that those case need to be counted in the statistics for the year the death certificate is issued. In last year’s statistics there were less than half as many reclassifications.
Through the end of November, New York City tallied 272 homicides involving people killed this year, Deputy Chief Lori Pollock said. At the same time last year, there were 275. “We don’t like to talk about it because it’s fairly consistent through the years, but this one happens to be — it hasn’t happened since 2006 where you had this many classifications over the year before,” Pollock said.
Criminologist David Kennedy said this year’s increase in New York’s homicide total shouldn’t be cause for alarm, rather it is a regular fluctuation. “Most of that change itself can be accounted for by a couple of standout incidents,” said Kennedy, a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College. “This is well within the absolutely expected fluctuation of what happens with violent crime rates.”
New York finished last year with 295 homicides, down from 335 in 2016. The tallies for recent years indicate a major victory for NYC and are drastically lower than they were in the early 1990s, when the city averaged a chilling 2,000 killings annually.
New York, the largest city in the country, with roughly 8.6 million residents, now has a homicide rate of about 3.6 per 100,000. Statistically, it means the Big Apple is impressively less deadly than some other big cities. Philadelphia for instance, which has approximately 1.6 million residents, had 351 homicides as of Friday, for a rate of about 22 per 100,000 residents. Chicago, which has about 2.7 million residents, had 482 killings this year, for a rate of about 17.8 per 100,000.
Halfway into this year, New York was set for its lowest annual homicide total since 1951, however in the second half of the year a series of killings raised the total. In October, a homeless man allegedly fatally beat four men with a metal pipe as they slept on the Manhattan streets. Days later, four people were killed at a Brooklyn gambling den.
The city’s homicide spike can be attributed to just a few neighborhoods, as per VIN News. In the Crown Heights precinct, where the gambling den was located, there have been 14 killings this year up from just two a year ago. Those included at least six other fatal shootings and several deadly assaults. In Queens, a precinct covering parts of Jamaica, St. Albans and Hollis has seen a three-times increase in homicides over last year, where killings jumped from five to 15. The Brooklyn precinct covering Coney Island and Brighton Beach had six killings this year after posting none last year. A precinct in the Bronx neighborhood, east of Yankee Stadium, doubled its year-over-year tally from six to 12. “We continue to see a high percentage committed by gangs and gang involvement,” police commissioner Dermot Shea said at a crime briefing this month.
Across NYC, other non-fatal crime categories, such as shootings, robberies and felony assaults, have also trended slightly higher this year. Some fear that the upward tick will escalate, as the bail reform keeping criminals out of jail will begin on Jan. 1st.
