Murders up 8.7 percent in New York City in 2019

December 6, 2019 Noah Goldberg

Police taped off the playground where one or more shooters shot twelve people — killing one — at a n annual block party in Brownsville. Eagle photo by Noah Goldberg

Police taped off the playground where one or more shooters shot twelve people — killing one — at an annual block party in Brownsville. Photo: Noah Goldberg/Brooklyn Eagle

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Murders citywide are up 8.7 percent this year, slightly disrupting the city’s downward trend in homicides over the past few decades, police announced Thursday.

The announcement came at the NYPD’s final crime briefing of the year, the first briefing presided over by new Police Commissioner Dermot Shea. So far in 2019, 299 people have been murdered, as opposed to 275 year-to-date last year, according to cops.

“We are very focused on the challenge of homicide … That’s simply not acceptable,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio at the press conference. “I want it to be clear. Everyone is doing their job and everyone is digging deeper to get under the skin of this problem and address it but we are not going to accept this situation.”

In Brooklyn, homicides have actually trended around the same as last year, with certain pockets of the borough seeing sharp increases in homicides while shootings and killings fall in other areas. Ninety-five people have been killed in the borough so far this year as opposed to 93 in the same time frame last year.

In Crown Heights’ 77th Precinct, more people — four — were killed in a single mass shooting at an illegal gambling den in October than were killed year-to-date in all of 2018. Fourteen people have been killed in the central Brooklyn neighborhood so far this year, as opposed to two in the same time in 2018.

In the precinct that covers Carroll Gardens, Gowanus and Red Hook, however, no one has been murdered this year, compared to four at this point last year.

More than half of all the murders in the city this year were shootings, and 20 percent were domestic violence incidents.

The murder tally through the first 11 months of the year already eclipses the total number of murders in either 2018 or 2017, when murders hit 295 and 292 respectively.

The last time the city saw a major spike in murders in a year was in 2015, when 352 people were killed, an increase of 19 murders from 2014.