New York · July 2026 briefing

New York Crime Rate Trends

Data sourced from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) Open Data portal and analyzed by Public Analyst.ai: 59 neighborhoods, 10 incident categories, twelve months of trailing comparison. Browse the rankings, scan the multi-year trends, or open a neighborhood-level breakdown.

Read methodologyUPDATED · AS OF 2026-07
183
tracked signals this month — across spikes, drops, sustained shifts, rare events.
-16.2%
overall city incident volume vs. trailing 12-month avg.
59
neighborhoods covered. Each gets its own page.
10
incident categories tracked, NIBRS-aligned.

Sexual assault rose sharply across New York in July 2026, with Brooklyn CD11, Bensonhurst posting the largest single signal at +117% against its multi-year baseline. Every position in the top five this month is the same category, spanning Brooklyn CD11, Bensonhurst, Queens CD7, Flushing / Whitestone, Queens CD8, Hillcrest / Fresh Meadows, Queens CD13, Queens Village / Cambria Heights, and Bronx CD8, Riverdale / Fieldston. That breadth makes this a category-level story, not a neighborhood-level one.

Citywide volume is down 16.2% against the prior 12 months, 229,646 incidents against 274,192 in the year before, a substantial reduction in overall crime. The signal mix reflects that: 103 sustained-shift signals and 74 below-trend signals dominate the 183 total, against just 5 spikes. All five spikes this month belong to sexual assault, which sets the July mix apart from recent briefings where spikes were distributed across categories.

This is the first month sexual assault has topped the citywide rankings. The category-wide pattern across five geographically separate neighborhoods is the main thing to watch heading into August. The broader citywide decline holds, but a single-category sweep of the top five, absent any prior-month run, is a structural signal that warrants tracking rather than treating as noise.

WHAT TO READ NEXT
Direct answers

New York Crime Frequently Asked Questions

Trailing 12 months vs the prior 12 months, computed from the same NIBRS-aligned categories used everywhere else on the page. Updated each July 2026 briefing.

Is crime in New York down?

Yes. Citywide incident volume is 16.2% lower than the prior 12 months.

Across the trailing 12-month window we tracked 229,646 incidents in NIBRS-aligned categories, compared to 274,192 in the year before, down 44,546 incidents.

Is violent crime in New York down?

Yes. Homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and sexual assault are down 12.4% combined in the trailing 12 months.

That's 48,939 violent incidents in the past year against 55,893 in the prior year. See the by-category section below for the per-bucket breakdown.

Is property crime in New York down?

Yes. Burglary, theft from vehicle, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson are down 17.1% combined in the trailing 12 months.

That's 150,105 property incidents in the past year against 181,154 in the prior year.

What are the safest neighborhoods to stay in New York?

  1. Staten Island CD3 — South Shore8.4 incidents per 1,000 residents
  2. Brooklyn CD12 — Borough Park9.7 incidents per 1,000 residents
  3. Brooklyn CD10 — Bay Ridge / Dyker Heights13.6 incidents per 1,000 residents

The three safest neighborhoods in New York, ranked by trailing-12-month incidents per 1,000 residents.

Computed as NIBRS-aligned trailing-12-month incident totals divided by the latest ACS 5-year residential population, expressed per 1,000 residents. Restricted to neighborhoods with at least 1,000 residents so park-only and industrial geographies, where visitor populations are not reflected in the residential denominator, are excluded.

Which neighborhood in New York saw the biggest crime drop?

Manhattan CD8 — Upper East Side: 30.4% fewer incidents than the prior 12 months.

Manhattan CD8 — Upper East Side logged 4,394 incidents in the trailing 12 months against 6,314 the year before.

City profile

The denominators behind the numbers

SOURCES · US CENSUS ACS 2024 · NYC OPEN DATA · NYPD
Geography
Land area302.6 mi²
Water area~165 mi²
CoastlineAtlantic + rivers (≈ 520 mi)
Boroughs5 (Manhattan + 4 outer)
NYPD precincts77
Community districts59 (analysis units)

Five-borough archipelago straddling the mouth of the Hudson — three of the boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island) sit on islands; only the Bronx is on the mainland. The 59 Community Districts are NYC's official sub-municipal unit, governed by Community Boards and used by the Department of City Planning for land-use review. We picked CDs over the finer-grained Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (195 NTAs) because CD-level density matches the platform's per-page target — comparable to Chicago's 77 community areas and SF's 41 analysis neighborhoods.

Population
8,445,255
Density~27,909 / mi²
Median age38.9
Households~3.32M
Avg HH size0.02

ACS 2024 5-year estimates. NYC spans 5 counties (Manhattan / New York County, Bronx, Brooklyn / Kings, Queens, and Staten Island / Richmond). Per-tract counts (population, households, housing units) sum across all 5 counties — but only the ~2,300 tracts whose centroid falls inside an NYC Community District in our crosswalk. Median figures (rent, home value, household income, age) on this profile reflect Manhattan / New York County only, so they lean wealthier and older than a true five-borough median; per-neighborhood medians on the neighborhood pages are tract-level and unaffected.

Housing
Units~3.66M
Median rent$2,197
Median home value$1.09M
Vacancy9.3%
Tenure
Renter 67%Owner 33%
Stock
SFH 16%2–4 unit 21%5+ unit 62%
Economy & people
Median HH income$103,931
Poverty rate17.9%
Unemployment8.0%
Bachelor's+41.5%
Foreign-born36.6%
Age distribution
<18 20%18–34 25%35–64 38%65+ 17%

City-level only. We deliberately do not juxtapose these with neighborhood-level crime data — see the methodology for why.

Built environment
Street miles~6,000
Parks (acres)~30,000
Subway stations472
Walk score88 (most walkable in the US)

Densest big city in the country; the subway and bus network shapes nearly every travel pattern in Manhattan, the western Bronx, northern Brooklyn, and northwest Queens. Outer-borough edges (eastern Queens, Staten Island, far-southern Brooklyn) are markedly more car-dependent and are mostly served by buses, the LIRR/Metro-North commuter rails, and the Staten Island Railway. The Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, the Cross Bronx, the Belt Parkway, and the FDR / Henry Hudson on Manhattan are the spine of the road network.

Policing context
NYPD sworn officers~33,000
Officers / 10K res.~38
911 calls / yr~7M
Open data lag≈ 14 days (settled)

NYPD publishes incident-level complaint data on NYC Open Data with roughly a two-week reporting lag. The feed uses NYPD's own offense classifications, which our category mapper translates into the same UCR Part 1 buckets used elsewhere on the site so cross-city comparisons stay apples-to-apples. NYPD operates 77 patrol precincts plus housing and transit bureaus; precinct boundaries cut across community-district boundaries, so the analysis unit on this site is the Community District, not the precinct.

Interactive map

Every neighborhood, color-coded

CLICK A NEIGHBORHOOD →
Category
Layer
Window
RAW COUNT · 1Y
1,4276,59911,770
Rankings

Largest moves this month

RANKED BY ANOMALY STRENGTH
#NeighborhoodCategoryMoMYoY 12movs baseline90-day trendSignal
01Brooklyn CD11 — BensonhurstSexual Assault-100%+66%+117%SPIKE
02Queens CD7 — Flushing / WhitestoneSexual Assault-100%+16%+66%SPIKE
03Queens CD8 — Hillcrest / Fresh MeadowsSexual Assault-100%+6%+42%SPIKE
04Queens CD13 — Queens Village / Cambria HeightsSexual Assault-100%-1%+114%SPIKE
05Bronx CD8 — Riverdale / FieldstonSexual Assault-100%+20%+53%SPIKE
06Manhattan CD12 — Washington Heights / InwoodVandalism-100%-29%-39%DROP
07Brooklyn CD15 — Sheepshead BayVandalism-100%-27%-38%DROP
08Brooklyn CD12 — Borough ParkVandalism-100%-31%-49%DROP
09Manhattan CD8 — Upper East SideTheft from Vehicle-100%-41%-53%DROP
10Brooklyn CD11 — BensonhurstVandalism-100%-21%-33%DROP
11Manhattan CD6 — Stuyvesant Town / Turtle BayOther Larceny-100%-25%-31%DROP
12Queens CD13 — Queens Village / Cambria HeightsVandalism-100%-13%-27%DROP
Showing top 12 of 20 (neighborhood × category) cells with tracked signals.
Multi-year trends

The long arc — eight years of monthly counts

SELECT A CATEGORY ↓
01632476320192020202120222023202420252026monthly12-mo rolling mean
Latest 12mo225
YoY 12mo-31%
5-year change-53%
Window change-26%
Peak (12mo avg)42 · May '21
Trough (12mo avg)19 · Jul '26
ALL CATEGORIES · 8-YEAR ARC · 12-MO ROLLING MEAN
2018 ─────────────────── 2026
When does it happen?

Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality

Distribution of bucketed incidents citywide across the full analysis window. Useful for routine context — shopping-strip thefts vs. late-night assaults read very differently when you can see when each typically happens.

HOUR OF DAY · ALL CATEGORIES
073,884147,76912am6am12pm6pm11pm

Hour 0 is mildly inflated by reports without a known time defaulting to midnight — see methodology.

DAY OF WEEK · ALL CATEGORIES
0182,391364,782MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
MONTH OF YEAR · ALL CATEGORIES
0109,762219,524JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
Browse

All 59 New York neighborhoods

Crime rate trends and July 2026 briefings for every tracked neighborhood. Alphabetical.

Methodology

How We Calculate New York Crime Trends

Open about how we define spikes, what we exclude as noise, where the data comes from, and how often the model is wrong.

# anomaly rule — spike
flag = (z >= 2.5) AND (current_12mo >= 20) AND (current_6mo above sustained band)
where z = (current_12mo − μ_baseline) / σ_baseline
# exclusions (excerpt)
· simple assault (varies by reporting practice)
· drug offenses (reflect policing policy)
· admin records, weapons-possession, fraud
# 2025 backtest (citywide)
7 of 10 categories ≥ 90% coverage. see table →