The season began with a troubling spike in gun violence, but crime stats from the last three months show the city is enjoying the safest summer in a quarter century.
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, when asked about the sharp rise in murders in some cities across the country, boasted on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” about the Big Apple’s recent drop in crime.
“Ironically, New York City this past summer, June to end of August ... this was the safest summer we’ve had in 25 years in terms of shootings and murders,” Bratton said Tuesday.
Crime statistics from previous summers weren’t immediately available. Bratton said he would make a full presentation Wednesday on the summer drop in crime.
The outlook was bleak at the start of the summer as critics warned of a return to the bad old days under Mayor Bill de Blasio, who followed through on a campaign promise to dramatically reform the NYPD’s use of the stop-and-frisk tactic.
Murder spiked a worrisome 19.5% in the first five months of 2015 and police were searching for a way to staunch the bloodshed. There were also spikes in the number of shootings and shooting victims.
The NYPD mounted a full-court press, rolling out its Summer All Out programin June, a month earlier than cops did in 2014, flooding the most dangerous precincts with extra officers. About 330 cops normally assigned to non-enforcement roles were trained for the deployment.
Cops were also assigned to a violence-reduction overtime program, working 4 p.m. to midnight and midnight to 8 a.m. The efforts appeared to work and increases in murders have since slowed to a trickle.
As of Sunday, there were 222 murders in the city in 2015 — an 8.3% increase over the same time period last year when there were 205.
If the pace were to continue, the city would finish the year with 333 murders in 2015. That’s just five more than the 328 murders in 2014. In 1981, there were 1,816 murders in the city. That figure dropped to 515 in 2011.
The number of people who have been shot this year has inched up less than a percentage point compared to 2014. Serious crime is down 4% citywide.
Asked about increases in murders in cities across the country, Bratton said there’s “something going on in our society and our inner cities.”
Then the city’s top cop made a reference to the controversial half-century old Moynihan report, named for its author Daniel Patrick Moynihan — then a staffer for President Lyndon Johnson.
“Talk about being prescient about what was going to happen, in black society, in terms of ... the disintegration of family, the disintegration of values...,” he said, referring to the document titled “"The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.”
His comments drew swift rebuke from the group Communities United for Police Reform.
"Police Commissioner Bratton has now once again promoted regressive and racist views that seek to place blame for crime and other societal challenges on the 'values' of black families and those of other New Yorkers of color,” spokeswoman Veronica Bayetti Flores said.
NYPD spokesman Stephen Davis said Bratton was referring to the areas of cities where the most shootings and murders occur.
“They’re the victims of the crime,” he said, noting a lack of jobs and poverty. “It’s happening in those communities.”
tmoore [at] nydailynews.com (Subject: NYDailyNews)