The State of Crime in New York City at Midyear 2025

This is the latest in a continuing Vital City series that takes a deep look at the data to put New York’s current public safety trends in context.

How safe is New York City today? The three leading mayoral contenders are presenting New Yorkers with distinct pictures of the state of the city’s safety. Incumbent Eric Adams says the city is “shattering crime record after crime record” and should therefore stay the course. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo says “New Yorkers feel unsettled, they feel unsafe” — and is calling for the hiring of 5,000 new police officers. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani wants the NYPD to focus on major crimes while creating a new Department of Community Safety to take over many police responsibilities. And among New Yorkers themselves, just 42% rank neighborhood public safety as excellent or good, with a wide range of opinions across the city. 

This much is beyond debate: The COVID pandemic represented a rupture for many American cities, including New York. After years of declining crime, violence spiked and public disorder spread rapidly. In November 2021, the city elected Adams in large part on a promise to bend those curves. 

Four years later, as many other cities’ violent crime rates have essentially recovered from the pandemic, New York sees real progress but serious continuing challenges. 

Where not otherwise stated, this report covers the period through June 30, 2025.

Overview

Here are the city’s trends in shorthand:

The good news:

• Major felonies are dropping so far in 2025 compared to 2024.
• Murders and shootings are near or at historic lows.

The bad news:

• Except for murder, major felonies are still well above prepandemic levels.
• New York City’s recovery from pandemic crime spikes lags that of most other large American cities.
• Assaults, both felony and misdemeanor, remain a stubborn problem.
• Total crime counts — including offenses that occur far more frequently than the seven major felonies — remain much higher than they were in 2019, undoubtedly shaping New Yorkers’ sense of safety.

The positives first: New York City is making substantial progress in reducing major felony crime, with a 5.7% decline in the seven major categories compared to this time in 2024. Murders and shootings are near or at historic lows.

In 2025, murders fell below one per day for the first time since before the pandemic. And across nearly every major felony category — except rape, which was redefined in 2024 to include a broader set of offenses, a change that may be related to rising numbers — New Yorkers are the victims of crime less frequently now than they were last year.

But it’s not all rosy. The city has yet to return to prepandemic levels for any major index crime category. In the first half of 2025, the overall count of major crimes — a term that comprises murder, rape, felony assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny of a motor vehicle — remains elevated by 30% compared to the same period in 2019. Felony assaults, which typically involve causing serious injury, using a weapon or assaulting a protected worker like a police officer, have held steady this year after years of especially steep increases.

Shooting incidents, in particular, have hit record lows.

What will full-year 2025 totals look like if current annual trends hold? Begin with this caveat: Prediction is more art than science, and there’s no perfect way to predict how crime will trend in the second half of 2025. Crime is seasonal and affected by many factors, both known and unknown. But because the same seasonal patterns tend to repeat each year, they shouldn’t distort year-over-year comparisons. So, to estimate where 2025 will end up, we assumed that the percentage decline seen in the first half of the year will continue at the same rate in the second half. It’s not a guarantee — anything can happen — but it’s a reasonable way to project the full-year totals.

If current trends continue, murders and shootings are on track to fall below 2019 levels by year’s end. The other major felony crimes will still remain meaningfully elevated compared to the city’s prepandemic low-water mark.

When compared to the nation as a whole and other populous cities, New York City is lagging in returning to prepandemic levels.

If 2025’s year-over-year decreases hold to the end of the year, cities with over a million people, mid-sized cities (with populations of 250,000 to 1 million) and rural areas will all see meaningful drops in murder compared to prepandemic levels. With the exception of Houston, the only city projected to have more murders in 2025 than in 2019, New York City is expected to see the smallest decrease in murders among the remaining eight cities. All other major cities are projected to experience declines ranging from 14% to 42%. One caveat to these comparisons is that several cities, including Chicago and Philadelphia, were experiencing rising murder rates even before the pandemic, giving them a higher peak from which to decline. In contrast, New York entered the pandemic period near historic lows, which may have limited the magnitude of possible reductions. Still, San Diego — the city with the lowest prepandemic murder rate among the top nine — managed to produce a larger postpandemic decline than New York.

Assaults: a persistent and brutal problem

As the city has made notable progress on murders and shootings, both felony and misdemeanor assaults remain a significant issue. Assaults have been on an upward climb since 2008, reaching their highest point since 1998 in 2024, even as other violent crimes have been declining back closer to prepandemic lows. 

Looking first at felony assaults: By definition, felony assaults result in disfiguring or similarly serious injuries or are committed with weapons, and/or are attacks against some public servants, police officers or other protected classes of people. And they occur often. While murders for many years have numbered annually fewer than 500, felony assaults are regularly counted in the tens of thousands. 

Put another way, in the first half of 2025, felony assaults happened 98 times more frequently and 43 times more frequently than murders and shootings did, respectively.

Why felony assaults are increasing is a puzzle. Typically, murders, shootings and felony assaults rise or fall together. The NYPD attributes the rise to several factors: increases in attacks by strangers, attacks on the elderly, attacks by a domestic partner and attacks on police officers or public administrators. Data on stranger victimization is currently not available to the public, but Vital City was able to confirm that there have been increases across the other three categories. In terms of volume, most of the rise in felony assaults is being driven by two categories: domestic violence cases and a broad category of other felony assaults, some of which may involve attacks by strangers.

Misdemeanor assaults are also significant crimes. While these assaults can be as simple as a punch, they can also encompass serious injury, such as leaving the victim unconscious or requiring stitches, and are even more numerous than felony assaults, consistently outnumbering them by more than 2-to-1 over the years. Misdemeanor assaults, like felonies, have also risen since the pandemic, with no signs of a downward turn.

The total number of offenses has reached an 18-year high

Many wonder why there is a persistent sense of unease in the city despite declines in many felony crimes. One likely explanation is the rise in overall crime.

Traditionally, law enforcement and the media focus on the seven major crimes tracked by the FBI — murder, rape, felony assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny of a motor vehicle — to standardize crime analysis across jurisdictions. But city life is shaped by far more than these serious, relatively rare, offenses. For example, in 2024, there were 332 misdemeanor assault complaints for every one murder, and 13.4 petit larcenies for every robbery. Examining “all crimes” — felonies (which numbered 188,418 in 2024), misdemeanors (which numbered 299,929) and violations (which numbered 88,761) — offers a fuller picture of life on the street and the types of incidents that most often affect New Yorkers’ sense of safety. Tracking changes in overall crime is challenging because what gets reported or recorded can depend heavily on police enforcement practices. If police suddenly surge enforcement of a particular offense, it will make it appear as the incidence of that crime is increasing greatly, whether or not that is actually the case. For example, the count of fare evasions may rise sharply, reflecting more that police are enforcing more heavily and thus recording the crime than that people are reporting or that incidence of the crime is increasing. With the federal adoption of a new way of recording crime — NIBRS (the National Incident-Based Reporting System), which requires law enforcement agencies to report a wider range of offenses — many minor violations like fare evasion that were previously underreported or excluded from official complaint files are now counted. As a result, increases in certain crime categories may reflect shifts in reporting standards rather than actual changes in criminal behavior. 

To better understand trends in crimes that directly affect New Yorkers, we grouped offenses into two categories: those likely to be influenced by police enforcement practices, like fare enforcement on public transit, vehicle offenses or offenses related to drugs, and those more likely to reflect victim- or witness-reported incidents, like assaults, larcenies and sex crimes, which are unlikely to be affected by enforcement. Our classification of offenses can be found here.

The top three victim-reported crimes by volume are petit larceny, which typically includes shoplifting or other thefts under $1,000; harassment, where a person intentionally harasses, annoys or alarms someone through physical contact, following or repeated annoying behavior; and misdemeanor assault. These increased by 23.1%, 20.6% and 15.3% respectively when comparing the first half of 2024 to 2019. These three crimes surpassed 250,000 in 2024, more than double the total of the seven majors combined. There are some encouraging signs in the first quarter of 2025, which saw modest but real declines in many crime categories compared to the same period in 2024: 11 of the top 17 victim-reported crimes dropped.

The subway

The subway is New York’s mobile public square, which millions of people use every day to get to work, school, doctors’ appointments and more. How safe it is and how safe it feels shapes how New Yorkers perceive the city more broadly. 

Federal officials claim the subways have dangerous levels of violence, but the numbers are clear: The rate of violent crimes on the subway is lower than on many of its peer transit systems.

What are subway crime trends like when we compare the New York City subway in 2025 to recent years? There are two ways to measure this.

The first is to compare overall crime counts in the transit system — not taking into account the number of rides. Looking at total crime counts, in the first half of this year, major crimes in the subway system fell by 3% compared to the same period in 2024, including a 7.7% drop in both robberies and grand larcenies. Both of these categories of crimes are now lower than they were before the pandemic. Compared to the first half of 2019, overall major crime underground is down nearly 10%, robberies are down 18% and grand larcenies are down nearly 27%.

The one exception, mirroring trends above ground, is felony assault. These incidents are now 65% higher than in 2019 and have continued to rise from 2024 to 2025. These are not especially common crimes underground — there are just 5.8 major crimes per day in the transit system vs. 317.1 per day in the city as a whole — but the increase is worrying nonetheless.

Murders on the subway are especially rare events. While last year’s 10 murders tied a grim record last experienced in 2022, so far the first six months of 2025 have included two murders, a pace that is more in line with prepandemic patterns. (Note: Two murders occurred on the subway in July shortly before the publishing of this report.)

Murders, felony assaults and grand larcenies are, of course, not the whole story. Any subway crime — not just the seven major felonies — affects how safe riders feel. Victim- and witness-reported crimes underground have been rising year after year from 2020 to 2024, as riders have steadily returned to public transit. But the totals haven’t quite climbed up to 2019 levels, which were relatively high (in contrast to city crime counts, which were low), along with very high ridership.

The second way to measure crimes in the transit system is not by counting their totals, but to calculate how many occur on a per-rider basis. This gives a more precise sense of relative risk, especially as ridership has dipped to modern lows during the pandemic and has been steadily climbing up ever since.

By this measure, crime has been dropping — but remains far higher today than it was over the period from 2006 to 2019.

In the first half of 2025, total victim-reported offenses on transit decreased, driven by a reduction in grand and petit larcenies.

Youth crime is near historic lows

New York’s Raise the Age law, implemented in 2018 and fully in effect by 2019, ended the automatic prosecution of 16- and 17-year-olds as adults in most criminal cases. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has argued that the law had unintended consequences, saying “When the age of criminal responsibility went up, the age of criminal suspects went down,” and suggesting that gangs began recruiting teenagers to carry out violent crimes with fewer legal consequences. This argument is not new. The NYPD was a vocal critic of Raise the Age before and after its passage, especially following the 2019 murder of Barnard College student Tessa Majors by teenagers in Morningside Park. That case was widely cited by law enforcement as evidence of rising youth crime and the consequences of juvenile justice reform.

There is little public evidence to support the claim that Raise the Age has led to increased youth crime. There is admittedly a lot of noise in these data, as many of the ages of suspects in the complaints file are unlisted or unknown. But when looking only at cases where the suspect’s age is known, 4.3% of complaints today involve suspects under 18, compared to 5.6% in 2018, the year Raise the Age began to take effect. That share remains lower than in the years before the law took effect.

There has also been a decrease in arrests among those who are under 18, and the data do not show that this cohort is arrested more often when they get older. Arrests of those in the 18-24 age group have also decreased year after year since the law was enacted.

The criminal justice system, arrest and post-arrest

A key measure of how effectively crime is being addressed is whether reported offenses lead to arrests and whether arrests turn into prosecutions — in other words, whether prosecutors assess that the evidence presented by investigators is strong enough to file a complaint or indictment. Similarly, the degree of deterrence a criminal justice system might bring to bear is affected by whether charges lead to convictions (whether by plea or trial), and then by the kind of penalty imposed. 

After an arrest is made, the strength of the evidence is tested by whether the prosecutor decides to proceed with the case, and then whether the evidence is sufficient to convict. Without a conviction, there may be little deterrent to future offending. 

Even before the pandemic, New York City’s conviction rates lagged behind the rest of the state by 20 to 30 percentage points. That gap has only widened in recent years. Conviction rates elsewhere in New York remained steady through the pandemic. But the city’s rates have fallen sharply. In the most recent data, just 36% of felony arrests in the city led to a conviction, compared to 80% statewide. For misdemeanors, the city’s conviction rate was 21%, versus 69% in the rest of the state. Overall, only 27% of arrests in the city resulted in a conviction, compared to 73% statewide.

This growing disconnect between arrest and conviction raises real concerns, not only about accountability, but also about deterrence and public confidence in the justice system. If the vast majority of arrests don’t lead to any meaningful consequences, people may reasonably question whether the system is functioning at all.

While conviction rates remained well below prepandemic levels — and even further below the rest of the state — the average monthly jail population has returned to levels not seen since 2019. Data show the monthly length of stay declining, but why that might be and whether it reflects a reality or a quirk of the data is not known. We suspect that what appears to be a steep drop in time spent in jail may actually reflect problems in city Department of Correction data.