Like many cities around the country, New York City experienced a sharp uptick in violent crime during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of these increases have now receded. As of 2025, murders and shootings are at or near all-time lows. The city’s murder rate also remains below the national average. At the same time, highly publicized individual acts of violence and the visible impact of ongoing challenges such as homelessness and untreated behavioral health issues contribute to a sense of public disorder.
Recent suggestions from the Trump administration about deploying the National Guard in New York risk oversimplifying the distinct challenges facing the city and diverting attention from the long-term solutions needed to keep New Yorkers safe.
This analysis provides an overview of what we know about recent crime trends in New York, drawing largely on New York Police Department crime data through midyear 2025, while highlighting the need for innovative, data-driven approaches to further reduce crime and improve safety.
Murders, shootings, and transit crime have dropped sharply since peaking during the pandemic.
Murders and shootings in New York spiked in 2020 during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. That year, shootings nearly doubled and murders jumped more than 40 percent compared to 2019. Murders climbed again, by 4 percent, between 2020 and 2021. To be sure, New York was far from alone in this experience; indeed, the city’s murder rate remained below the national average throughout this period. Violence rose in cities, rural communities, and places of all political alignments during this period. Research suggests that the disruptiveness of the pandemic, gun trafficking, the loss of government services, and the erosion of public trust may have contributed to these increases.
Since then, New York has made considerable progress. The murder count has now fallen by more than 34 percent since 2021. Similarly, the number of shooting incidents, which includes lethal and nonlethal shootings, plummeted by 54 percent between 2021 and 2025. Recent data shows these decreases continuing through 2025, bringing shootings in particular to historic lows. This trajectory tracks national trends, as the most recent annual FBI data, covering 2024, showed sharp, historic declines in violent crime and murder across the country.
Crime on New York subways and buses also spiked during the pandemic when measured on a per-ride basis. This change stemmed from a brief but pronounced decrease in ridership, because those who continued to take public transit were at much higher risk of witnessing or experiencing crime. On a per-ride basis, crimes on transit rose from around 1 major felony per million rides to nearly 10 per million. But here, too, the city appears to have turned a corner. Major crimes committed on transit, a metric that the NYPD and news reports track closely, are trending down and generally are similar to rates in the late 2010s. According to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, recent months have been some of the safest in the system’s history.
Additionally, while concerns about subway safety are understandably top of mind for many, given the subway’s close quarters and importance to the city economy, crime on city transit generally remains very rare. To put per-ride crime statistics another way, there were more than 750,000 subway and bus rides for every major felony in 2024, with larceny (theft) accounting for more than half of that total.
Like other types of crime, offenses committed on transit are also highly concentrated at specific times and locations. Half of all violent crimes in the transit system occur at just 30 of the city’s 472 stations — generally the city’s busiest — and the highest per-rider risk occurs late at night and early in the morning. Most stations see few serious offenses of any kind.
New York remains one of the safest big cities in the country.
By most metrics, crime is rarer in New York than in many other parts of the country, as a close review of FBI data on crime in major cities demonstrates. In 2024, the most recent year with national data, the city’s murder rate was lower than the national average. It also ranked eighth lowest of the 50 largest cities that reported crime data to the FBI that year. New York also had the sixth lowest rate of property crime, though it ranked squarely in the middle of other cities in terms of violent crime. At the time of publication in late 2025, murders had fallen 19 percent relative to the previous year.
New York also provides a strong example of “the great crime decline” — the precipitous and complex drop in crime experienced by most of the country between 1990 and the mid-2010s. In New York, that decline lasted longer than in most other cities, until roughly the start of the pandemic. Even as the city population grew, murder counts dropped from more than 2,000 in 1990 to just over 300 in 2019, the last full year before the Covid-19 pandemic. At a per capita level, the murder rate fell by nearly 90 percent, far outpacing the national decline of 45 percent. Research that accounts for New York’s large population has also found that it ranks as the safest U.S. city in terms of firearm violence.
Despite this progress, some types of crime remain elevated.
Though New York remains overall a safe place to live and work, it would be a mistake to ignore its enduring problems.
First, felony assaults — which involve aggravating factors such as serious physical injury, the use of a weapon, or injuring a police officer — rose in recent years and remain high, defying the national trend and the experience in other cities. NYPD data indicates that the frequency of these crimes began rising as far back as 2010 and accelerated in the early 2020s. All told, the number of felony assaults has risen by roughly 42 percent since 2019.
Reasons for this increase are not immediately clear. The trend is especially perplexing considering that gun violence declined over the same period. One factor worth studying could be whether this spike indicates an increase in domestic violence, which some studies suggest rose nationally during the pandemic. In New York, 40 percent of felony assaults entail violence between members of the same household. Another theory is that some of this increase could reflect an uptick in assaults related to untreated behavioral health crises.
Additionally, even as major crimes on city trains and buses trend downward, some transit-related offenses remain stubbornly high. Assaults on transit that do not result in serious injury or entail the use of a weapon — “third-degree” assaults, treated as misdemeanors under New York law — are well above pre-pandemic levels on a per-ride basis. These offenses remain rare, occurring at the rate of roughly one per million rides. But they are deeply disturbing to victims and bystanders alike and shape perceptions of safety in the subway system.
NYPD data also shows increases in rape and sexual assault over the past year, following declines during and after the pandemic. This increase, however, may stem in part from improvements in how often survivors report sexual assaults to police and how police define the offense. Following the enactment of a new law in 2024, New York’s definition of rape now includes all forms of nonconsensual sexual contact. Through mid-2025, the expanded category accounted for approximately one-fifth of reported rapes, potentially explaining much of the increase.
High levels of shoplifting are another cause for concern. Shoplifting rose slowly over the past decade, interrupted by a brief drop in 2020 as foot traffic fell during the first months of the pandemic. But shoplifting then surged dramatically in 2022, jumping 68 percent above 2019 levels. New York is hardly the only city that saw such a spike in the immediate wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. But it is one of the few cities where offense counts remain high. Here, New York also defies the national trend; the most recent FBI data for 2024 shows that larceny (which includes shoplifting) reached a historic low.
While it is too early to say for sure, the surge of retail theft in New York may have peaked, as shoplifting counts dropped by roughly 7 percent between 2023 and 2025. A perennial caveat remains: Retail theft data is notoriously subject to reporting issues that make it hard to determine whether any change in the trend, for better or worse, reflects a change in the number of crimes happening or the number being reported. (Data concerns are even more pronounced when it comes to “organized” retail theft.)
Last, declines in gun violence have not been evenly distributed. Gun violence is largely concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods, which together account for roughly 50 percent of the city’s shooting incidents. An interactive map published by The New York Times provides a visual representation of this trend; the majority of the city sees relatively few shootings, whereas the South Bronx, Brownsville, and East Harlem experience many more. These neighborhoods are home predominantly to people of color and communities already facing challenges such as concentrated poverty, systemic disinvestment, historical segregation, and other predictors of violent crime.
Policymakers should focus on solutions to long-running challenges.
Local policymakers should develop a public safety strategy that prioritizes these remaining problems. That could start with working to identify the causes of New York’s high incidence of felony assaults and developing tailored strategies for reducing the frequency of these offenses.
One promising approach is the NYPD’s announcement of a highly trained new specialized police unit for handling domestic violence cases, which account for a large proportion of felony assaults. This new initiative could streamline investigations and improve police interactions with survivors, enabling cases to proceed faster without the need to, for example, repeatedly re-interview survivors and witnesses. Early intervention and access to more intensive programming can also reduce the risk of escalation by addressing both the abuser’s behavior and the survivor’s needs.
The apparent rise in rape and sexual assault calls for a similar approach. Law enforcement professionals should continue seeking to understand the reasons behind this increase and the degree to which it can be explained by changes in the definition of these crimes or increases in reporting by survivors of sexual assault.
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New York City policymakers have made enormous strides toward creating a safer city. Building on that work calls for careful, focused attention on specific public safety challenges and the unique needs of the largest U.S. city.
