It's not just Hell's Kitchen and there are no specific islands of safety. I was just offering a bit of guidance based on where I would want to stay if I was visiting from elsewhere. You should stay wherever you feel comfortable staying.
Major Crimes Rose 22 Percent in New York City, Even as Shootings Fell
Homicides fell last year to their lowest level since 2019, before the pandemic, but other categories of crime, including robbery and burglary, drove the overall increase compared with 2021.
Jan. 5, 2023
Surges in robbery, burglary and other crimes drove a 22 percent increase in overall major crime in New York City last year compared with the year prior, despite a significant drop in shootings and murders.
Mayor Eric Adams, who campaigned on a promise to improve public safety, said at a news conference at Police Department headquarters that the city had made progress. He lauded the agency for its efforts to increase gun arrests and rid the five boroughs of illegal guns and drugs.
Still, the mayor said the city must drive down robberies, burglaries and grand larcenies — categories that contributed to the increase in what it defines as major crimes last year, to 126,537 from 103,388 in 2021. The mayor said retail theft and subway safety are among his top concerns.
“We know we have more to do,” Mayor Adams, a former police captain, told reporters at the news conference. “New Yorkers must be safe based on the stats, and they must feel safe based on what they’re seeing. That is my obligation: to ensure that safety is felt.”
The declines in murders and shootings last year appeared to be in line with similar drops in other U.S. cities, which, like New York, experienced a surge in such crimes in 2020 and 2021 amid the worst of the pandemic, criminal justice experts said. These experts“No credible criminologist would tell you that you can interpret crime trends based on a one-year analysis,” said Jeffrey A. Fagan, a professor at Columbia Law School.
History shows, he added, that crime rises and falls in cycles because of various social factors and that declines in murders and shootings after the sharp increases of the past two years were natural. The recent increases in shootings and homicides in New York remain far below the outsize figures of the 1980s and ’90s.
Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that — setting aside the figures for murders and shootings — the overall picture painted by the 2022 statistics was that “crime is up in New York City, and it’s up quite a bit.”