NYC rang in the New Year with 998 shootings, a roughly 12% drop from 2015’s 1,138; Police Commissioner James O’Neill predicted this historic low in December when he estimated that 2016 would end with under 1,000 shooting incidents.
In addition to a decrease in the number of shootings in NYC in 2016, there was a decrease in the number of homicides, down 5% from 2015. However, 2014 saw the record low number of 333 homicides, two less than the 335 homicides in 2016. Overall in 2016, serious crime dropped by 4%.
O’Neill was named Police Commissioner in September after former Commissioner Bill Bratton relocated to the private sector. New York City’s success this year, especially in having fewer shooting and homicide incidents than Chicago, with 4,431 shot and 762 murdered, is no small victory for the new Police Commissioner. “This is a tremendous achievement,” he said at Crain’s New York Business breakfast forum December 14.
The NYPD credits this major achievement to a new policy in which investigators give more focus to those who have committed crimes more than once in the past, called the precision policing approach to fighting crime; under this principle, cops are focusing on areas prone to being one-person crime areas.
Additionally, cops are using a new neighborhood policing strategy, in which they build ties with residents by working in the same area frequently, even issuing their department cell phone numbers to residents of their cities in case they are needed.
O’Neill told the Daily News in September, “If the same cops are there every day, they know who the good people are.”
The crime drop in 2016 is also credited to the recent restructuring of NYPD investigative forces. Many divisions were given “investigative chiefs” to act as bosses who report to Robert Boyce, Chief of Detectives.
