The NYPD released its April 2026 CompStat summary on May 4, and the headline is the kind of stat that ends up framed in police academy hallways: 19 murders citywide in a single month, the fewest April murders in New York City’s recorded history. The previous record — 21 — was set in both 2014 and 2017. Through the first four months of 2026, the city has logged 76 murders, breaking the four-month record low of 86 set in 2018.
Here is the problem with CompStat numbers: they are accurate, they are verifiable, and they almost never tell residents what they actually want to know. So let us decode what the April release means for the decisions you make tomorrow morning.
What CompStat Is, and Why It Is Worth Reading
CompStat — short for “Computer Statistics” — is the NYPD’s weekly accountability dashboard. It tracks the seven major crime categories (murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, grand larceny auto) at the citywide, borough, and precinct level. The public-facing portal is CompStat 2.0, and the underlying microdata lives on NYC OpenData.
Think of CompStat as the department’s internal scoreboard for last week’s game. The April 2026 monthly summary is essentially the box score for an entire month, published in the NYPD’s May 4 press release.
The April 2026 Headline Numbers, Translated
Citywide, overall major crime fell 9.5% in April 2026 versus April 2025: 9,157 reported crimes versus 10,114. That is 957 fewer victimizations in a single month.
Inside that overall number, here is what changed compared to April 2025:
- Murder: down 40.6% (19 vs. 32) — record low for any April
- Robbery: down 13.8%
- Burglary: down 21.5%
- Auto theft: down 20.2%
- Felony assault: down 6.0%
- Grand larceny: down 4.4%
- Retail theft: down 17.7%
- Shooting incidents: down 18.6% (57 vs. 70)
- Shooting victims: down 19.3% (67 vs. 83)
- Hate crimes: down 35.1% (50 vs. 77)
Reported rape was the only major category that rose. The NYPD attributes part of the increase to New York’s expanded legal definition of rape under the “Rape is Rape” law, plus continued efforts to encourage survivors to come forward. Reported rape numbers should therefore be read as a mix of two things: actual incidents, and the system getting better at counting and classifying them. CompStat does not separate those two signals, which is one of its real limitations.
What 19 Murders in a Month Actually Looks Like
New York City is a city of roughly 8.3 million people. Nineteen murders in a 30-day month puts the citywide monthly homicide rate at about 0.23 per 100,000 residents — below the rate of most American cities of comparable size. For context, NYC’s historic murder peak was 1990, when the city recorded 2,245 murders in a single calendar year. April 2026’s monthly figure would have been an average week back then.
The historical April baseline matters here. April 2025 was 32 murders. April 2024 was higher. April 2017 and April 2014, the previous April record-holders, were 21 each. April 2026 at 19 is not a one-off blip on a noisy chart — it is the low point of a multi-year downward trend.
For a resident’s daily-decision calculus, here is the translation:
- The probability that any given New Yorker is the victim of a murder in any given month is, statistically, lower right now than it has been in any month NYPD has measured.
- The probability that you witness or are near a shooting is also at multi-decade lows. April had 57 shooting incidents across the entire five boroughs combined.
- The probability that your apartment is burglarized or your car is stolen is down roughly 20% from where it was a year ago.
That does not mean nothing happens. It means the number that happens is the lowest it has ever been measured.
Borough Breakdown: Where the Drops Are Concentrated
The Bronx led April’s reductions, with major crime down 15.5% borough-wide. The borough recorded four murders in April — the lowest April figure ever for the Bronx, which has historically carried a disproportionate share of citywide violence.
Staten Island has not recorded a single murder in 2026 through April 30.
Year to date, all five boroughs, plus transit and public housing, are down on major crime. Public housing in particular is having the safest start to a year ever recorded by the NYPD: lowest murders, lowest shooting incidents, lowest shooting victims, and lowest robberies in NYCHA developments since the department began tracking the comparison.
Resident Decisions This Actually Translates Into
If you live in the Bronx and have been holding off on a Friday-evening neighborhood walk because of a 2024 or 2025 perception that things were tense, the April CompStat is telling you the streets are measurably less violent than they were 12 months ago.
If you live in NYCHA housing, the lowest-ever start to a year on every gun-related metric is the relevant input — not a generalized national headline about “urban crime.”
If you take the subway, transit major crime is down year to date. The April monthly transit figures are not yet broken out by line in the public press release, but CompStat 2.0 publishes the system-level transit summary on Tuesdays.
If you have been deciding whether to leave a car parked on the street overnight, grand larceny auto is down 20.2% in April 2026 versus April 2025. It still happens. The trend is the trend.
What CompStat Will Not Tell You
CompStat does not include misdemeanor assaults, low-dollar shoplifting under the felony threshold, quality-of-life complaints, mental health crises in public spaces, or unreported incidents. If your daily worry is about visible disorder — public drug use, aggressive panhandling, mental health episodes on the train — CompStat is the wrong dashboard. Those concerns are real, and the citywide drop in shootings is not the metric that addresses them.
CompStat also does not tell you about your block. Precinct-level data is the most granular public layer. If you want sector-level or block-level patterns, the NYPD does not publish that to the public, and no honest read of the data should claim CompStat answers it.
How to Read Next Week’s Numbers
CompStat updates weekly. The next NYPD weekly release will cover the week of May 4 through May 10, 2026, and will post to compstat.nypdonline.org. When it lands, three reading habits keep you from being misled:
- Compare year-to-date totals, not single-week numbers. One week swings wildly.
- Read the “vs. 2 yrs ago” column. The “vs. last year” column tracks recent direction; the “vs. 2 yrs ago” column tracks where the city actually is.
- Read borough breakdowns before the citywide top line. Citywide averages obscure huge disparities — a Bronx number can move while a Manhattan number stays flat, and the citywide line splits the difference.
The Bottom Line for Tonight
The April 2026 CompStat release is, by any honest read of the data, one of the strongest single-month crime reports in NYC’s recorded history. Murders at an all-time April low. Shootings down roughly 19%. Burglaries and auto thefts down roughly 20%. All five boroughs trending down year to date. Public housing on its safest start ever measured.
If you have been making daily decisions on a 2020 to 2022 mental model of NYC crime, the April 2026 data is the moment to update that model. The streets are not the same streets they were three years ago. The numbers, the ones the NYPD itself signs its name to, say so.
Sources Cited
- NYPD Press Release, May 4, 2026 — April 2026 Crime Statistics
- NYPD CompStat 2.0 Public Dashboard
- NYPD Citywide Crime Statistics (Weekly PDFs)
- NYC OpenData — NYPD Shooting Incident Data (Year to Date)
