NYPD On Track For Most Peaceful Year On Record, Still Hiring Over 1,000 More Officers
Last month was the most peaceful June in New York City on record, according to Compstat, the crime-data tacking program instituted by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton in 1994. The decrease in overall crime was marked by a 34% drop in homicides from June of last year, although some violent crimes like rape and murder have slightly increased from a year ago.
The current tally of overall felonies reported and or tracked by the NYPD in 2015 puts the department on course for its most peaceful year to date, according to NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Operations Dermont Shea, who told the New York Daily News, “We have never fallen below 100,000 index crimes and we are on pace right now, halfway through the year, to fall under 100,000.” Shea later added that, “if that can be accomplished it would be quite significant.” The current lowest number of violent crimes ever recorded in New York was in 2010, when there was a total of 105,011 felonies.
The NYPD’s plans to keep crime low are clearly contingent on an approach revolving around flooding the streets with the police, and so it has embarked upon a hiring surge of 1,300 new officers that will take place next year. The New York Times reported that the police department’s spree of new hires is probably in response to the slight uptick in murders for the whole year from last year; viewed with a skeptic’s eye however, de Blasio’s new hire plans might look like a concession thrown at a department that literally turned their backs on him earlier this year.
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