Major crime continued to rise during Mayor Eric Adams’s first fiscal year in office — as NYPD response times slowed across the board, according to the mayor’s yearly report.
The sprawling Mayor’s Management Report, — which addresses every facet of city government and this year mentions the migrant crisis more than two dozen times — says felony crime nearly topped 127,000 reports over the fiscal year 2023, a 6.4% jump from the prior year.
That’s also a more than 35.6% jump from pre-pandemic times, according to the report which covers the period from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023.
Only two categories, murder and rape, saw an improvement, while the rest ticked up year over year.
At the same time, average response times for all crimes jumped by nearly two minutes to 14 minutes and 24 seconds.
Even critical and serious crimes in progress showed sluggish responses, with critical active incidents slowing more than half a minute to 9 minutes and reports of serious crimes taking just over 13 minutes for a cop to arrive, which is more than a minute slower.
The breakdown of crime from the report reveals:
- Murder was down 9% — 424 vs 465
- Rape was down 7% — 1,088 vs 1,168
- Robbery was up 5% — 17.047 vs 16,178
- Felony assault was up 8% — 26,959 vs 25,034
- Burglary was up 2% — 15,054 vs 14,793
- Grand larceny was up 5% — 51,455 vs 49,227
- Car theft was up 20% — 14,902 vs 12,448
The report also highlights the NYPD’s clear refocus on broken windows policing — issuing 134,580 minor tickets, which is nearly double that last year.
The Post revealed earlier this year that cops had been doling out an astounding number of tickets for drinking in public under the new administration.
The city highlighted the department’s successes in closing cases, noting that major felony arrests jumped to nearly 50,000, which was up about 7,000 collars.
Gun play throughout the city, a key focus under the Adams administration, dropped by 23% leading to 412 fewer victims of gun violence.
“The mayor is the first to say that there is always more work to do, but the public safety gains we’ve made over the last 20 months have ensured New York City has remained the safest big city in America,” City Hall spokesman Jonah Allon said.
“Under the mayor’s leadership, the city saw a downward trend in major crimes at the end of 2022 and major crime is down overall in 2023, year-to-date, including a double-digit decrease in shootings,” he added.
In other parts of the 520-page report, the effect of the migrant crisis is laid out, including how it has pushed shelter costs into the stratosphere, leading to a surge in applications for the Big Apple’s municipal IDNYC cards.
The city was so desperate for help that it even enlisted the arm of the mayor’s office dedicated to financing the arts, museums and other institutions to distribute clothes at shelters.
The number of families depending on the scandal-scarred Department of Homeless Services for shelter jumped by 50 percent last year — increasing from 8,500 families to more than 12,700.
During the reporting period, which ran from July 2022 to June 2023, the overall number of people in DHS shelters increased to 66,195 from 45,563 the year before.
“Without the new asylum seeker population, the overall census would have been approximately 10 percent higher than just prior to the beginning of the asylum seeker influx in April 2022,” DHS wrote.
The cost of renting all the hotel rooms played out in the MMR too as the average expense for sheltering a family with children in 2023 leaped to $232.40, up from $188.20 in 2022.
The strain put on the shelter system showed up in other ways: The number of requests for interpreters nearly doubled in just one year from 47,504 to 84,020.
The Human Resources Administration, the city’s social service arm, reported that the percentage of New Yorkers successfully diverted from entering the shelter system fell slightly from 8.1% to 7.6% because of the influx of migrants, who are eligible for fewer services.
Meanwhile, applications for the Big Apple’s ID program, created to provide a form of identification for anyone without a driver’s license regardless of immigration status, jumped by 14 percent, from 168,000 in 2022 to 192,000 in 2023.
The report notes that even the arts got involved.
“This year, on top of housing teaching artists, MFTA served as a crucial resource for asylum seekers, providing desperately needed clothing and supplies to shelters,” wrote the Department of Cultural Affairs in its section of the annual report.
