Violent crime in New York City took a nosedive in the early months of 2025 under NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s no-nonsense leadership.
Tisch took over the department at the end of last year and immediately cleaned house of allegedly corrupt top officials as she introduced new policies to improve New Yorkers’ quality of life and cut down on repeat offenders.
As the first quarter of the year concluded, finalized crime statistics exclusively shared with The Post reflected her efforts.
Murders dropped to 63, compared to 96 in the first quarter of last year — a whopping 35% decrease, according to sources.
There have been 140 shootings, with 164 victims, so far this year — a 23% dip from the 182 shootings and 214 shooting victims recorded in the same time period of 2024, the data showed.
If the Big Apple stays on this trajectory, New Yorkers could see the lowest number of murders and shootings on record in nearly a decade — since 2017, when there were 267 murders and 2018, when there were 754 shootings.
“Tisch is running this like a business, and the bottom line is crime reduction,” a Manhattan detective said.
The new data comes just after shootings in NYC fell to a 30-year low at the end of February.
Tisch, who took over the country’s largest police department in November, hit the ground running as she beefed up neglected programs and began tracking if cops responded to New Yorkers’ 311 complaints as part of her “quality of life” crackdown.
The new approach, complete with its own “Quality of Life” division, targets aggressive panhandlers, open-air drug use, and homelessness. It also introduced specialized teams that Tisch said would have officers following “strong, centralized leadership” rather than the various units throughout departments.
She also altered the police academy requirements in order to expand the force, she said. She vowed to reinstate the required timed 1.5-mile run and sliced the minimum college credits needed from 60 to just 24.
In early January, Tisch wrote in an op-ed for The Post that she prioritized addressing the climbing recidivism rates, which she believed kept New Yorkers from feeling safe despite the improvements being made to the NYPD.
“Imagine how disheartening it is for our cops to arrest the same people, for the same crimes, in the same neighborhoods, over and over. And how scary it is for New Yorkers to see the same person who victimized them one day, walking the streets the next,” Tisch wrote.
“The time for band-aids and half measures is over, because the revolving door of the criminal justice system fails to put the rights and needs of victims first. New Yorkers demand, and they certainly deserve, better.”
The Post has reached out to Commissioner Tisch for comment on the first-quarter crime stats.
