The State of Crime in New York City: 2025 and Beyond

The big picture

New York City made progress on public safety in 2025. Shootings and murders fell to historic lows, and most major crime categories declined compared to the year prior. These improvements reflect gains in the city’s most serious forms of violence.

But it is not good news across the board. New York City has not returned to its 2019 prepandemic levels for most crimes, and its recovery has been slower than that of many peer cities. In two areas in particular, things are not so rosy. Felony assaults increased for the sixth year in a row, now reaching a level not seen since 1997. This is a significant problem, as this is a serious and high-volume offense that outnumbers murders by 97 to 1. And after a promising start to 2025, major crime rose in the final months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, creating worries that the positive trends that marked the earliest part of Jessica Tisch’s term as commissioner may not be sustained.

There is another issue also that swims against the general narrative of “crime is falling” and may be the reason why many New Yorkers feel uneasy. When we look at all reported offenses, not just the seven major crimes, these are about 25% above pre-pandemic levels and at a level not seen since at least 2006, when these crimes were more consistently tracked. These crimes — harassment and misdemeanor assault, among others — are far more numerous than major crimes (579,549 vs. 121,756). And they are more visible, more felt in everyday life because unlike murder, which is highly concentrated in geography and relatively rare, these are citywide, above and below ground. They consist of the punch, the shove and the shout on the street and the subway, and are daily signals of insecurity. 

Understanding the complex crime picture beyond the well-deserved victory laps around murders and shootings will be crucial for Mayor Zohran Mamdani if he is to successfully translate campaign promises into pragmatic policies, including the planned establishment of a Department of Community Safety. This report first summarizes what happened in 2025, then examines the key nuances beneath headline declines, and finally outlines the trends to watch in the coming years.

2025: safer than 2024, but not yet recovered from pandemic highs

In 2025, New York City experienced modest declines in major crime compared to 2024. Totals in most of these categories fell compared to 2024, continuing a downward trend from the pandemic peak.

However, overall major crime in 2025 remained substantially higher than it was in 2019, the last full year before COVID destabilized communities and New York City, like most U.S. cities, experienced a surge in violent crime from which it is still recovering.

Looking back over the past 30 years, the steep drop in crime seems worth the moniker of “New York miracle.” It is not just that the sheer number of crimes committed has declined, but also that the kinds of crimes New Yorkers suffer most often have changed. This horserace-style chart is like watching a movie of New York history as, for example, car thefts — once so common that “Nothing in Car” signs and Bensi boxes marked the culture of 1990s New York — drop from first to fourth place while felony assault climbs from fifth place to become the second most common major offense.

Shootings and murders fell to historic lows

Some crimes have fallen below prepandemic lows. Shootings are at their lowest level since consistent records began in 1993, while murders are lower than they’ve been in every year since the 1950s, except for 2017 and 2018. The city also experienced more shooting- and murder-free days in 2025 than in any year since 2019. This is another, and perhaps more intuitively understandable, way to measure safety, again reflecting how much lethal violence has declined in New York City.

An asterisk: New York is recovering more slowly than other big cities

Despite low homicide levels, New York City’s reduction in this category since the prepandemic period has been modest compared to other large cities and the nation overall.

Since 2019, New York City has experienced a roughly 3.1% reduction in murders — less than a third of the national decline and smaller than nearly all other large cities. In absolute terms, New York remains safer than most large cities. In relative terms, however, its recovery has lagged.

Beyond murders and shootings, most other crimes, especially assaults, remain above prepandemic levels 

Despite the good news on shootings and murders and significant declines in most crime categories between 2024 and 2025, most major crime categories remain above their 2019 levels.

It is also notable that crime declines were not uniform throughout the year. The largest reductions compared to the same period in 2024 occurred in January and February. By contrast, November and December 2025 recorded higher crime levels than in 2024, raising questions about whether the downward trend will continue into 2026, beyond the cold-weather months when crime traditionally declines as people stay indoors.

Perhaps the city’s single most troubling trend is that felony assaults — defined as assaults that intentionally cause serious physical injury, involve use of a weapon or dangerous instrument, or victimize a protected worker or individual — have been a persistent and growing problem in the city and are the highest they have been since 1998. This is a significant problem not only because the crime is fearsome, but because its overall numbers are high: Felony assaults outnumber murders 97 to 1 (29,841 vs. 309). Total felony assault counts have risen 84% since 2008, when they were at their lowest level, 44% since 2019 and 1.3% between 2024 and 2025. 

Misdemeanor assaults, defined as those that intentionally cause physical injury without use of a dangerous weapon, also rose year after year from 2020 through 2024. They declined by 3.3% in 2025 — the first drop since the pandemic period began. 

Total assaults, both felony and misdemeanor, remained 23.2% higher in 2025 than they were in 2019.

Domestic violence remains a central and often under-recognized driver of serious crime. In 2025, 39% of felony assaults were classified as domestic violence, a share consistent with recent years. And domestic incidents — those involving members of the same family or household, including spouses, intimate partners, parents and children — also accounted for a persistently high share of murders and rapes. Because these offenses typically occur behind closed doors, they are less responsive to traditional street-level enforcement and instead require sustained coordination across policing, social services and the courts.

The total volume of crimes experienced by New Yorkers is up 25%. While official record-keeping in New York City and across the country focuses on the seven major crimes (and sometimes shootings) we have outlined above, it is often the increasing incidence of crime, even if termed “minor,” that affects the quality of daily life of New Yorkers. The top 10 crimes by volume, many of them considered “less serious” crimes, account for more than three-quarters of all reported crime. Misdemeanor assaults outnumber shootings 91 to 1. Petit larcenies, which refer to small thefts of under $1000, outnumber shootings 158 to 1.

An increase in the count of a given crime does not necessarily mean that the city is less safe. Some counts are highly sensitive to policing strategies; for instance, if police decide to escalate or dial back on fare-beating or drug-possession enforcement, the counts for those crimes will surge even though the incidence of the offense may not have changed much from year to year. To account, roughly, for this phenomenon — so crime fluctuations are not skewed by changes in police enforcement — we have isolated crime counts that rely on victim and witness reports from others.

Even with this adjustment, victim- or witness-reported crimes remain 21% above prepandemic levels and higher than any year since at least 2006, indicating that New Yorkers’ unease on the streets reflects real conditions rather than perception alone.

What about the subways?

Crime on platforms and trains is of outsized concern for New Yorkers because the subway is New York City’s mobile public square, the place where millions of people come together on a daily basis. Adding to anxiety is that trains are enclosed spaces where people can’t easily remove themselves from dangerous situations. As a result, even though crime is a very rare occurrence on the subway, incidents — whether rare horrific ones or more common quality-of-life problems — reverberate through the city, provoking concern.

In 2025, the issue was a political football as well, as federal officials used it in a pretextual way to threaten funds to the City. 

By some measures, crime is getting lower, even touted by the governor as the “lowest levels in a generation” in 2025. Measuring based on total crime counts, that is true (ignoring the peak of the pandemic, when crime counts were for a brief period extremely low because ridership hit unprecedented lows). By another measure, crime underground is not at record lows. Once ridership is taken into account, the rate of major crime per ride remains approximately 13.4% higher than prepandemic levels.

Total subway crime counts are highly sensitive to police enforcement. Shifts in police presence and intensified fare-evasion enforcement can raise overall counts without a comparable increase in actual victimization. For example, in 2025, there were 34,559 total crimes on the subway, of which 13,725 were related to fare evasion. 

Focusing on victim- or witness-reported crimes shows a pattern similar to major subway crimes: Total counts have declined since the pandemic, but the per-ride rate remains 21% higher than in 2019.

What to watch for under a new administration

Public safety, trust and accountability The Mamdani administration took office on Jan. 1, promising a new approach to public safety policy — one that relies less on police enforcement and more on civilian interventions. There are some glaring challenges, as we have noted: the rising number of assaults; the overall volume of crimes, even as murders and shootings decline; the stubborn problem of domestic violence. Here, we note a few other issues that require attention from the potential threat posed by federal enforcement, to some fundamental issues in the functioning of the justice system, including the decades-long spiraling violence in the jails.  

Increasing federal immigration enforcement in New York City

No description of the public safety and law enforcement landscape in New York City would be complete without a mention of federal immigration enforcement, which has ratcheted up across America. Nationwide, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents are arresting far more individuals suspected of immigration violations — usually a civil, not a criminal offense — in the interior than under previous administrations. The majority of these individuals are not suspected of any criminal activity, but enforcement itself has become a significant source of fear among many immigrant New Yorkers.

We note this even though it is not an issue that New York City or New York State controls, because it can affect the life of the city and the functioning of its justice system. We have seen elsewhere that a sudden influx of ICE and/or the National Guard affects the lives of residents, whether documented or not; can damage the economy as people are afraid to go out; and can harm civic life as residents fear taking their children to school and using public parks. The conduct of ICE agents — including brutality complaints and a documented failure to abide by basic constitutional guarantees — is destructive by itself, but also has an effect on local law enforcement and its own ability to build a relationship of trust with New Yorkers.

Hate crimes remain a persistent issue in New York City, with 68% more reported hate crimes than there were in 2017. Jewish New Yorkers have accounted for a majority of victims in recent years. These offenses affect the daily life of all New Yorkers and determine whether they are at ease in the city or fear attack.

How police interact with the public affects their ability to address crime. Here we look at stops and frisks, complaints against officers and clearance rates, a measure of the number of cases being solved and thus, directly and indirectly, a measure of the confidence that New Yorkers have in the police’s ability to help them.

The number of misconduct allegations against police officers more than doubled during the administration of Mayor Eric Adams. Abuse-of-authority allegations constitute the majority of complaints and account for much of the recent increase in total allegations. These cases generally involve claims of improper stops, searches, questioning or arrests. Some of the post-2021 rise may reflect a structural change in oversight, as beginning in 2022, the Civilian Complaint Review Board gained authority to open investigations without a civilian complainant, which can increase case volume independent of underlying misconduct.

While Mamdani has said he does not support defunding the NYPD and will maintain current police staffing levels, his past criticism of the department and focus on alternative models have generated public interest in how policing strategies and tactics will evolve going forward. How police training, accountability and community relations change under new leadership will shape not only enforcement outcomes but also public trust in the criminal justice system.

Justice system operations

The role of prosecutors, defenders, courts and incarceration are also important when creating a strategy to reduce crime. While there are many parts of the criminal justice system, two metrics are particularly worth monitoring because they reflect the health — or lack of health — of the larger system: clearance rates and dismissal rates.

A clearance rate is the proportion of cases the police solve, measured as a percentage of the number of crimes. The police define clearances as the percent of cases that result in an arrest (meaning that a judge or grand jury has determined there is probable cause that the person has committed a crime) or that the department “exceptionally” clears, for example, in the case of a person against whom evidence was sufficient to charge, but the person has died. Because solving a case requires evidence, and more often than not the evidence is in the form of a witness coming forward, clearance rates are a good marker of the confidence of New Yorkers in the department.

How a case proceeds through the system can be a canary in the mine for where there are problems, just as clearance rates can be a signal of New Yorkers’ willingness to cooperate with police. Dismissal rates can be a marker of different problems at different points. In New York City, the dismissal rates are very high overall and contrast with dismissal rates in the rest of the state, showing a troubling variation in the administration of justice and potentially undermining confidence in the system.  

At arraignment — the first appearance of a person before a judge after arrest — approximately 20% of cases do not proceed to the next stage (indictment). Of that 20%, a remarkable 52% are dismissed, giving new meaning to the notion that “the process is the punishment.” For the 80% that do make it past arraignment, an astonishing 75% are dismissed.  Looking further into the reasons for dismissal, at least two seem that they could be remedied: dismissal for speedy trial reasons or for a legally insufficient instrument, meaning that the evidence did not support the charge.

Jails

The city’s jails have a long and brutal history of violence and mismanagement. In 2015, following a suit by the U.S. Department of Justice, the city agreed to a consent decree in Nunez v. City of New York that put the jails under a judicially supervised monitor. The aim of the consent decree was to reduce the unconstitutional levels of violence. Since 2015, violence has soared well above the levels considered unconstitutional in 2015.

In the face of this abject failure, the court took a highly unusual step of appointing a receiver, called a “remediation manager” here, who has broad executive power, beyond any commissioner, to remedy the wrongs.

As this federal official, now named, gets situated and his working relationship with the city’s new correction commissioner is defined, the city must address violence on Rikers Island, including use of force by correction officers, deaths, stabbings and slashings and the average length of stay of those incarcerated there.