New York City has become a much more dangerous place, with police data noting that 2022 had the highest recorded number of felony crimes in 16 years.
According to the New York Police Department (NYPD), there were 172,852 felony crimes reported in 2022, the most since 2006, when the department first started sharing such statistics publicly. (Related: More people are rapidly leaving crime-ridden, high-cost cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago.)
Almost every single felony crime category rose from 2021 to 2022. Grand larceny of a vehicle rose by 32 percent, followed by burglary, which rose by 27 percent, and then robberies, which rose by 26 percent.
They are followed by grand larceny, dangerous weapons, rape and felony assault, which rose by 25 percent, 21 percent, 17 percent and 15 percent, respectively.
One of the few felony crimes to drop last year was murder, which the NYPD attributed to a reduction in shootings. But the number of felony crimes in New York City still rose by 20.4 percent compared to 2021, when only 142,522 felony crimes were recorded.
Serious offenses rose by 22.4 percent from 2021 to 126,588. This is also the first time that major crimes in New York City rose above 120,000 incidents in a year.
Crime a serious issue in New York City
The staggeringly-high felony crime figures highlight the struggles that remain for Democratic Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD. Last year, both the mayor and the police focused much of their attention on tackling gun violence and subway crime. While this did result in a decrease in the number of murders, it did end up diverting far too much of the NYPD's very limited resources to preventing just one kind of criminal activity.
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Adams himself has blamed the rise in crime on criminal justice reforms passed in 2019 by former far-left New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, which allowed thousands of offenders back into the streets. Adams, a former police officer himself, has vowed to boost funding to the city's District Attorneys' Offices to get recidivists let out by De Blasio back behind bars.
Meanwhile, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has proposed providing $40 million in additional funding for more prosecutors and another $40 million to help deal with the discovery burden that has led to an increase in criminal case dismissals under the 2019 reforms.
"Things in a large city aren't supposed to grow that much or go down that much in one year," said former NYPD Supervisor Chris Hermann. "This is kind of like monumental kind of stuff … like once in a lifetime."
"The end-of-year numbers are horrible," he added. "Like, there's no way to get around that."
While not included in the NYPD's data, police experts warned that other felonies should also be taken seriously, such as criminal mischief and criminal contempt. These so-called "minor crimes" can often be a "prelude" to more serious offenses, warned Hermann.
"Criminal trespass is always a prelude to burglary, which can be a prelude [crime], which can quickly become a robbery, which can then quickly become an assault," he said. "The misdemeanor assault becomes a felony assault, becomes the domestic violence shooting – there has always been an escalation of violence with regard to domestic violence. Those things you know, certainly do matter."
These non-major felonies are also on the rise in New York City. There were 13,006 incidents of criminal mischief recorded in 2022, up from 11,052 in 2021.
Criminal contempt, which people are often accused of for flouting a judge's order, rose from 8,463 incidents in 2021 to 10,216 by the end of 2022. Dangerous weapon complaints also rose from 3,952 to 4,783.
Learn more about the rise in crime and violence in other parts of the United States at Violence.news.
Watch this clip from Next News Network as host Gary Franchi discusses how even illegal immigrants are abandoning New York City.
This video is from the News Clips channel on Brighteon.com.
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