NYC murder rate drops 22 percent
An undated file photo of a NYPD Crime Scene Unit vehicle in front of 2 Rector Street in lower Manhattan. Credit: Joel Cairo
The murder rate in New York City has dropped 22 percent so far this year compared with 2010, police said Wednesday.
From January 1 through March 8, the NYPD reported 62 murders, a decrease of 17 from the same period a year ago. The 2011 results include nine deaths reclassified as murders from a year ago.
The latest murder rate data comes a day after the NYPD released an analysis that showed that murders last year among blacks increased in 2010 by 31 percent compared with 2009. In 2010, blacks comprised 67 percent of the total of 536 murder victims in the city while representing 25 percent of the population.
The NYPD has been aligning with black clergy in an effort to reduce violence in that community and deal with so-called black-on-black crime. In 2010, some 60 percent of those arrested for murder were black and of those 85 percent of their victims were also black, said the NYPD.
The current-year statistics show that 61 percent of the murder victims were black, 27 percent Hispanic and 11 percent white. Shootings were involved in 58 percent of this year's murders, 30 percent involved stabbings, and the rest asphyxiation, blunt-force trauma, arson or vehicular homicide.
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