During the first half of the year there were 36 murders in the Bronx over 3x LESS than Philadelphia during the same period which has a similar size population.
23 years ago in 1990, the Bronx had approximately 603 murders in the entire year so as you can see, this is great news for the Bronx. This perception that the Bronx is unsafe and a violent place is a relic from the 90s.
Read the rest from the Daily News:
Murders and shootings are both down 29% so far this year, Mayor Bloomberg said Sunday.
There were 168 murders through July 14 — down from 235 over the same period last year. And shootings fell from 763 to 545.
“That great news isn’t isolated to a few neighborhoods – every borough has gotten far safer,” said Mayor Bloomberg, who touted the results in his weekly radio address.
Overall crime dropped more modestly, by 2.2%.
Bloomberg said the Bronx, where murders have dropped 36%, is on pace to have fewer than 100 killings this year “for the first time since 1966, when Mickey Mantle was in centerfield at Yankee Stadium.”
He boasted that the Bronx and Brooklyn are now safer than whole cities with similar populations; the Bronx, for example, has about the same number of people as Philadelphia, but had 36 murders in the first half of the year, compared 116 in the City of Brotherly Love.
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And Brooklyn had 71 homicides — fewer than half the 188 total for Chicago, which has roughly the same population, he said.
Bloomberg has aggressively defended the NYPD’s use of the controversial stop and frisk tactic as a key to the big drop in violent crime, though opponents disagree. The city had a record low 419 murders in 2012.
“We won’t stop working to keep guns off the streets and out of the hands of criminals,” he said.
But mayoral hopeful John Liu, who wants to end stop-and-frisk, disagreed with the mayor’s methods. “We can keep people in this city safe and keep crime low without having to humiliate hundreds of thousands of people, almost all of whom have done nothing wrong,” Liu said at a mayoral forum Sunday night.
