The NYPD’s latest weekly CompStat release covering April 13–19, 2026 dropped a mix of numbers that look very different depending on whether you read the headline or the breakdown. Citywide major crime is still trending down. But two categories — rape and felony assault — moved in the wrong direction this week. If you live here, the question isn’t “is crime up or down” — it’s “what does this week tell me about how to move through this city tomorrow morning.”
Here is the decode.
The Headline: Major Crime Is Still Falling — And It’s Falling Hard
Year-to-date through April 19, the NYPD logged 69 murders citywide, down 25.8% from 93 at the same point in 2025. Robbery is down 8.7% (3,604 vs. 3,946). Burglary is down 20.3% (3,109 vs. 3,903) — the steepest drop of any major crime category, and on track to rival the second-lowest annual burglary count in recorded NYC history.
The Q1 2026 picture released by the NYPD on April 2 anchored these trends to historical baselines that genuinely matter. The first three months of 2026 produced 54 murders citywide — fewer than the 60-murder Q1 record set in 2018, which had been the all-time low. Shooting incidents tied the Q1 2025 record of 139 — itself a record-low quarter. Burglary’s YTD figure of 3,109 is the second-lowest in recorded history.
For a resident trying to read these numbers, the practical translation is this: the chance of a violent or property crime touching you in any given week of 2026 is meaningfully lower than it was in 2024 or 2025, and meaningfully lower than the 5-year rolling average. That is not the same as “no crime.” It is “less crime than recent memory.” Plan accordingly.
The Divergence: Two Categories Pointed Up This Week
The single-week numbers for April 13–19 are where the headline and the lived reality diverge.
- Rape: 51 reports, up 30.8% from 39 the same week last year.
- Felony assault: 637, up 12.1% from 568.
- Murder: 4, down 55.6% from 9.
- Robbery: 255, down 11.1% from 287.
- Burglary: 197, down 14.0% from 229.
Translation matters here, and the NYPD reporting language doesn’t make it easy. Two things to know.
First, “rape” in NYPD CompStat reflects reports filed in that week, not necessarily incidents that occurred in that week. A spike in reporting can reflect victims coming forward about older incidents, a successful outreach effort by a precinct’s Special Victims unit, or a single multi-victim case. It does not necessarily mean week-over-week incidence rose by 30.8%. Reporting infrastructure shifts are real and visible in this category, and any single-week movement should be read against multi-week and quarterly trends rather than treated as a same-week event spike.
Second, “felony assault” is the most heterogeneous of the seven major-crime categories. It can mean a stranger street attack, a domestic violence assault, a bar fight that produced serious injury, or an assault on a police officer or transit worker. A 12.1% week-over-week jump (568 to 637) is 69 additional incidents — not a massive number in a city of 8.3 million, but enough to notice. Felony assault has been one of the stickier categories in 2025–2026: while murder, robbery, and burglary have fallen sharply, felony assault has resisted that downward pull, particularly in transit and overnight retail environments.
What this means for daily decisions: the underlying texture of street risk in NYC right now is less about being shot or held up at gunpoint and more about being caught in someone else’s altercation. That maps to a practical posture — situational awareness around bars at closing time, late-night subway platforms, and any environment where alcohol, fatigue, and crowd density combine.
How to Read the Borough Spread
The Q1 release flagged the Bronx as the borough leading the citywide decline, with a 9.4% drop in major crime — the steepest of the five boroughs. That detail matters because borough-level reductions are not happening in lockstep. For residents in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and Staten Island, your borough is also down, but your borough is down less.
If you live in the Bronx and the Q1 narrative reads “this is the safest first quarter we’ve measured,” that is not marketing — that is what the numbers say. If you live elsewhere, the same statement is directionally true but smaller in magnitude.
This is the kind of nuance that headline coverage typically flattens. A resident who reads “NYC crime down 5.3%” gets one piece of information. A resident who reads “Bronx down 9.4%, the rest of the city averaging closer to 4%” can make different decisions about which subway line to take to a friend’s apartment, which neighborhood to look at when shopping for a lease, and how to weight a friend’s “I don’t go to that part of the city anymore” comment.
The 5-Year Baseline: What “Down” Actually Means
The Q1 2026 murder count of 54 is the most useful single anchor in this week’s data. The 5-year window of Q1 murder counts (2021–2025) sat well above this number across the board, with quarters in the 75–95 range. The 2026 figure of 54 is materially below the 5-year average and roughly 10% below 2018’s 60-murder all-time low.
For a resident, that translates into the following: if you have been making daily-decision adjustments based on a sense of NYC danger that crystallized in 2020 or 2021, those adjustments are responding to a city that no longer matches the data. The arithmetic of your gut may be calibrated to a different New York than the one currently being measured.
This is not a claim that the city is “safe” in some absolute sense. There is no such thing. It is a claim that the comparative risk you are weighing — when deciding whether to walk home, which subway car to ride, whether to pick up groceries at 11 p.m. — is materially lower than it has been in years.
What’s Sticky, What’s Fading
A useful resident-side framework for the latest numbers:
Fading fast: Murder. Shooting incidents. Robbery. Burglary. These four categories are doing the heavy lifting on the downtrend, and three of them (murder, shooting, burglary) are at or near recorded-history lows for the year-to-date period.
Sticky: Felony assault. Rape (reporting-sensitive, but flagged). Hate crimes — the Q1 release showed confirmed hate crimes up 11.7% (143 vs. 128 in Q1 2025), with 55% (78 of 143) classified as anti-Jewish.
Sticky in a different way: Quality-of-life and disorder offenses that don’t appear in the seven-major-crime CompStat headline at all. Subway disorder calls, fare evasion, and shoplifting trends are tracked in parallel reporting and influence resident perception of safety even when major-crime numbers are falling. The gap between “what the numbers say” and “what the city feels like at 11:30 p.m. on a Tuesday platform” is largely explained by this category.
What to Actually Do With This Week’s Data
If you live in New York and you read one summary of NYC crime stats this month, this is the resident-utility version of it:
- The base rate of violent and property crime affecting you on any given day is at or near a recorded-history low. Calibrate your default posture accordingly.
- The categories that are still moving up — felony assault, hate crimes, and reported rape — concentrate in specific environments (bars at close, transit late nights, communities targeted in hate-crime patterns). Adjust for those environments specifically rather than for the city in aggregate.
- The borough you live in matters. If the Bronx leads on improvement, the gap between Bronx improvement and the rest of the city is narrowing a long-standing reputational gap in real time.
- If you are weighing whether to go somewhere or do something in NYC, the current data does not support deferring on the basis of generalized fear. It supports deferring on the basis of specific environmental risk — which is a different decision tree.
The next CompStat weekly release lands in mid-week. We will decode that one too.
Sources
- NYPD CompStat 2.0 (live dashboard)
- NYPD Citywide CompStat PDF (week ending April 19, 2026)
- NYPD Press Release, April 2, 2026 — Q1 record-low murders and shootings
- NYC.gov — Citywide Crime Stats Landing Page
