Don’t believe everything you read
This weekend, the New York Post ran an article that could’ve been titled “Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.” Under the headline “Shootings spike as temperatures rise in NYC, surging over 50% last week,” it began: “Gun violence in New York City has spiked along with the mercury, with shootings up more than 50% last week compared to the same time last year — indicating that the Big Apple could be in for a bloody summer.” Where to begin? Crime of all kinds goes up and down day by day, but it is just wrong to look at a couple of days to forecast a trend — as wrong as saying a windy day means a scary hurricane season is in the offing. In fact, larger gun violence trends in New York City today are quite positive: The city had the lowest number of shootings on record in the first three months of 2025, with the year to date now the third-best year on record, ever since officials began tracking this stat in the early 1990s.
Do shootings increase as the weather warms? Yes; that’s a well-established fact, as underscored by this research by Vital City research director Paul Reeping and David Hemenway. It’s why all responsible coverage matches up comparable periods in any given year. But any honest analysis of the data in the city right now shows that for the first time since the pandemic started, New York City is on track to return to the historic low of under 800 shootings it achieved before the pandemic, in the period from 2017 to 2019 (along with under 300 annual murders).
The total of 61 shootings in the last four weeks remains below average — and any histrionics about a single-week jump are just that.