New York City’s homicide rate remains higher than it was before the pandemic in 2019 — even as the national average has largely returned and even dropped below pre-pandemic levels, a major new national crime study has found.
Homicide rates are up about 20% through the first half of 2024 compared to the same time in 2019, the Council on Criminal Justice’s (CCJ) newly-released Mid-Year Crime Report found.
And while the city’s homicide rate was is down 20% from the same time in 2023, over the last three years the city has been consistently unable to return to pre-pandemic homicide levels of about 1.5 murder victims per 100,000 people.
“‘I’m left here with nothing but memories,” said Danette Hollie, whose 37-year-old son Nazim Berry was fatally shot in the back of the head after refusing to give a madman a free cigar at a Crown Heights bodega in February.
The fact that there’s been an annual decline offers little consolation, she said.
“I’m here suffering right now,” Hollie told The Post. “Emotionally, mentally. For a parent to have a child murdered like that, slaughtered. Just his life innocently snatched away from him.”
Homicide across Gotham spiked severely during the 2020 summer of unrest at the outset of the pandemic, rising year over year from 2019 by 33% — and then skyrocketing about 90% by the summer’s end, according to CCJ’s data.
The rate has dropped year over year ever since, but remains stubbornly higher than pre-pandemic levels four years on.
During the first half of 2024 the homicide rate remained elevated at 1.8 per 100,000 — a difference of only .3 from before the pandemic, but one that equates to about 25 more real-world New Yorkers dead by homicide when spread across the city’s more than 8.3 million population.
As New York’s homicide rate remains elevated, enough cities across the country have settled back to and even dropped below pre-pandemic levels to bring the national homicide rate to 2% below what it was during the first half of 2019, according to CCJ.
That national decline was largely driven by drops in larger cities with traditionally high homicide rates — including a 23% drop since 2019 in St. Louis, a 7% drop in Detroit, a 19% drop in Philadelphia, and a massive 40% drop in Baltimore, CCJ found.
Overall crime in NYC is on the decline, according to the latest numbers from the NYPD, which show a 2.2% decline year to date in 2024.
Gun violence is down by 11.5%, which equates to about 50 fewer New Yorkers falling victim to shootings this year.
“While one shooting or one homicide will always be one too many, crime in New York City clearly continues to trend in the right direction,” an NYPD spokesperson told The Post.
But Hollie said she feels things are trending in the wrong direction despite the numbers.
“[Crime] has gotten worse, and let me tell you the reason why it’s gotten worse. It’s because people are literally getting away with murder,” Hollie said.
