Major Crimes Rose 22 Percent in New York City, Even as Shootings Fell

Beyond getting illegal guns off the streets, Professor Fagan said, the police have limited control over whether shootings and killings occur.

Still, Keechant Sewell, who is closing her first year as New York’s police commissioner, sought to highlight the declines in those categories as evidence of her department’s plans for returning crime to its historic, prepandemic lows.

“We knew we would not turn this city around on a dime,” Commissioner Sewell said. “We did not stumble into these decreases. They were not happenstance. We strategized, planned, deployed and recalibrated when necessary.”

Statistics can be affected by police departments’ decisions about how to classify crimes, what they investigate and in New York’s case, its own definition of serious crime that includes some property offenses. But the numbers released Thursday provided a variety of measurements of the state of New York City’s crime and criminality:

Arrests

All told, there were 189,777 arrests citywide in 2022, a 22 percent increase from 2021.

Of those, 47,572 were for the most serious crimes: homicide, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny of a motor vehicle.

The number of arrests linked to shootings and homicides, 1,411, rose about 12 percent from the year before.

The city saw the most gun arrests in 27 years, said Michael LiPetri, the chief of crime control strategies. There were 4,627 last year.