NYC recorded lowest number of shootings and homicides in recent history, Mayor Eric Adams says
Confiscated guns are displayed on a table ahead of New York Mayor Eric Adams' press conference on public safety at City Hall on Tuesday. Credit: Getty Images/Michael M. Santiago
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch touted historic violence reduction trends Monday and derided the notion that the city was out of control with bloodshed, despite the fact that soaring gun seizures indicate that there is no shortage of illegal firearms.
"The last five months, we have had the lowest number of shootings and homicides in recorded history," Adams said at a City Hall news conference with Tisch by his side.
"You have people running around saying the city is out of control, the city is out of control — the lowest number of shootings and homicides in recorded history in this city," Adams repeated for rhetorical effect.
Facing a tough reelection campaign, Adams has played up the crime reduction numbers for many months, calling the latest news an "amazing achievement."
According to Adams, there has been a 54% reduction in shootings since January and 41% reduction in homicides. Those decreases are the largest since just before the pandemic. Overall serious crime for the first five months dropped 4.9%, police data showed.
Officials indicated that the baseline for the statistics wasn’t all of the city’s history but rather around 1993, when the vaunted Compstat statistical system was initiated.
"These are numbers to celebrate," said Richard Aborn, head of the New York City Citizens Crime Commission, a nonprofit entity to advocate for crime fighting and public safety issues.
Tisch highlighted the trends for May and said the recent Memorial Day weekend was also historic with no shootings on the holiday Sunday for the first time in 32 years. Tisch said the Memorial Day weekend capped a decline in May of murders by 46% over the prior period in 2024, and shootings dropped 39% with shooting victims dipping 38%.
Since he took office in January 2022, Adams has heralded the number of illegal-gun seizures, which in the last nearly 3½ years totaled 22,000, with 2,200 seized so far in 2025.
But some law enforcement experts have said privately that the large number of gun seizures is a sign that there appears to still be a constant flow of firearms into the five boroughs. For perspective, the total number of firearms seized under Adams' watch would be enough to arm a large U.S. Army division, about 20,000 soldiers.
Even former NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell once said at a news conference that the supply of illegal guns seem larger than police expected.
Aborn said one question to examine is whether the large number of gun seizures means that there were always that many illegal firearms about or that they increased after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that loosened licensing restrictions.
Chris Hermann, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the five-month crime trend on shootings and homicides may be an indication that crime is getting down to pre-pandemic levels.
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