NYPD Annual Crime Report: Robberies, Assaults & Rapes on Rise; Adams Claims City is Safest in the World
Edited by: TJVNews.com
As violent crime continues to significantly escalate in New York City, the NYPD has released its annual round-up of crime over the past year. The revelations included in the report are not all that surprising to the average New York City resident. Crime has spiraled in virtually every category, despite recent assertions from New York City Mayor Eric Adams, according to a report in the UK Daily Mail.
The dismal statistics show that the city’s efforts to squelch crime have abysmally failed. Since the Covid pandemic arrived on the scene in early 2020, the city has been plagued with an increase in crime, while city officials try to come up with methods to tamp it down. Mayor Adams has said several times over the last year that he has been successful in lowering the crime rate but statistics prove otherwise.
The data, released by the department Wednesday, comes exactly two weeks after Adams assured citizens that officials had taken strides in the unrest, while touting supposed gains in public safety, as was reported by the Daily Mail of the UK.
Early last year Adams had spoken of his ‘Blueprint to End Gun Violence’ as well as a ‘Subway Safety Plan.’ Statistics included in the report reveal that both plans proved ineffectual in lowering the city’s crime rate.
The New York Post recently reported that since 2020, murders in the city’s subway system have skyrocketed to the highest annual levels in 25 years, even amid plummeting ridership numbers, according to data supplied by the New York Police Department.
The earliest data that the Post gained access to was back in 1997 and it appears that there had never been more than five subway murders in a single year until the dreaded Covid-19 pandemic emerged in the early part of 2020. As such, it raised that number the first time in decades.
The next year, murders shot up to eight, the Post reported. Over the last year, there have been nine killings in the transit system. Together with 2020s toll, that’s 21 slayings — which is more murders than the transit system saw between 2008 and 2019 combined, the Post reported.
Despite the deployment of more than 1,000 more police officers in the system since the pandemic began, a survey released at the end of 2022 by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority found 70% of riders felt there were too few officers in the system, the AP reported. Barely more than 50% said they felt safe or very safe on trains or in stations.
“We obviously have work to do,” New York City Transit President Richard Davey said recently, as was reported by the AP. “We’ve got to stop this.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced the MTA would put cameras on all of its nearly 6,400 subway cars to rebuild riders’ faith in the system’s safety, the AP reported. The project is expected to take three years to complete.
New York City’s subway system already has more than 10,000 existing security cameras in its 472 stations.
Speaking to the New York Post, Professor Maria Haberfeld from CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal, and a former lieutenant in the Israel National Police said, “It used to be ‘I know if I don’t go to this neighborhood, I will be safe,’ but today you don’t have that.
“You can take the subway anywhere at any time of day, in broad daylight, and there is no guarantee of safety,” she told The Post.
The Post reported that prior to the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, when an average 142 million people rode the trains each month, three murders happened in the subway system. These days, an average of just 81 million people are taking the train monthly, a small uptick from 2020 and 2021, which saw an average of 53.3 million and 63.3 million riders per month, respectively, the report said.
The data shows that rapes, robberies, and assaults are all up from last year, since hitting highs not seen in decades in both 2020 and 2021, according to the Daily Mail report. In 2020, rape increased when streets were empty and unemployment was rife due to the unrest caused by the pandemic increased by 7 percent, with more than 120 occurring this year than last, the UK report added.
Robberies, meanwhile, rose a shocking 20 percent. The UK Daily Mail reported that assaults and theft throughout the city, meanwhile, show a similarly pronounced rise, with felony assaults up 12 percent – 26,039 incidents this year compared to 22,835 seen last year – and burglaries up an alarming 25 percent.
In a heinous and brutal crime that shocked the city, the late September stabbing murder of Alison Russo-Elling, an on-duty FDNY lieutenant whose life ended in a random attack in Queens has become a touch point in the ongoing conversation about the rampant crime that has gripped the city. The Post reported that Russo was a 24-year veteran of the department and planned to retire in just six months to spend more time with her daughter and grandchildren.
Lt. Alison Russo-Elling, who was attacked less than a block away from her station house, was one of the first responders at Ground Zero after the 9/11 terror attacks and “dedicated her life to saving others,” her shocked colleagues told the Post.
The 61-year-old “was about six or seven months away from retirement,” Vincent Variale, president of Local 3621, told reporters outside the hospital where Russo-Elling succumbed to her injuries. “She was talking about it.”
The Post reported that Russo-Elling had gone to grab food when she was stabbed in what authorities said was a random and completely unprovoked attack.
“Our job is a very dangerous job. It’s as dangerous as fire and police. We’re assaulted just as much,” Variale said, the Post reported. “We lose a lot of members unfortunately, and we are not treated the same.”
Police took Russo-Elling’s alleged killer into custody at his nearby home, where he fled to after the attack, the Post reported.
The newly released crime statistics directly contradict repeated statements from Mayor Adams about crime rates decreasing with an extra police presence on the streets, the report said.
During a press conference in midtown, Mayor Adams said, “Anyone who studies crimes, they know it’s about. How do we continue to trend in the right direction,”’ as was reported by the UK Daily Mail.
‘New York remains — and people sometimes forget this, but I really want to highlight this,’ Adams said, ‘the safest big city in America.’ The UK Daily Mail report said that the mayor went on to add: ‘And in 2023, we want to push this city to be safer.”
The mayor, meanwhile, argues that ‘it’s just a small number of people — around 1,694 people — who are just wreaking havoc on our city.’ He has yet to comment on the recently released statistics.
