Crime Spiked 60% Citywide in the Past Week, NYPD Statistics Show

by Yehudit Garmaise

While crime rates usually go up in warmer temperatures, in the past wintry week alone, crime has increase 60% citywide, NYPD statistics show.

“Near-zero temperatures can’t keep the criminals away,” a Bronx police officer told The New York Post. “It will only get worse as it gets warmer.”

On Thursday, in City Hall, after Mayor Adams spent the day with President Joe Biden to show him what the efforts and innovations New York City was making to reduce crime, the mayor said that while crime rates continue to spike, he asks New Yorkers to be a little patient, as his administration warms up to full strength.

“We are not going to [be able to] say tomorrow to every police officer in the Bronx, where almost 37% of our shooters are coming from, we want you to move out of the area and patrol the streets,” said the mayor, who said as he gets more resources to those areas, then police officers will not be as necessary for constant patrolling: as they are now. 

“We need to start putting resources into organizations help communities so that police are not so needed in those communities,” Mayor Adams said that local organizations can “lift up the presence of the police in those areas.”

Car theft, which spiked 116%, was the crime that showed the biggest increase last week, when 255 cars were reported stolen for the week that ended Sunday: compared to the 118 cars that were stolen in the same week in 2021.

Grand larceny soared by more than 93%, with 908 crimes reported: compared to the 470 that were reported in the same week last year.

While many bills on guns, bail reform, and other crime-related issues are stalled at the state and federal level, Mayor Adams, who is putting up checkpoints at the Port Authority to check incoming visitors for guns, said he is focusing on what he can do "to build up this foundation [of public safety] right here in the city of New York to try to prevent the flow of guns.

“We need to make sure those guns that are coming on the Greyhound Bus don’t continue to do so," the mayor said.

“We are in control of the legislation around ghost guns,” which are guns that are ordered as kits online and created at home without registration numbers, the mayor said. “There are things we can do right here, while we are waiting on the US Congress to do their job: to deal with this violence."