Report: NYC subway crimes increased in 2022
New York City saw a decrease in shootings and homicides in 2022 over the previous year, but there was a 23 percent increase in major crimes and about a 30 percent increase in crimes in the subway system, according to data released by the city's police department.
The increase came as officers performed hundreds of thousands of additional police patrols in the transit system -- more than 1.5 million last year -- and arrests rose 47 percent.
The surge in subway patrols is necessary to reduce crime and put riders at ease, Mayor Eric Adams said at a briefing about the crime data on Thursday. "Once we stabilized that, we're going to right-size," he said. "You're going to see a normalizing of the number of people who are there."
Adams, a former police captain, has made tackling crime, which soared early during the pandemic, the central priority of his administration.
Subway ridership has stagnated at 60 percent of 2019 levels and as a result of the depressed ridership, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) said in December that it would hike fares by 5.5 percent, cut spending and reduce service on some subway lines.
The New York City Police Department is spending an additional $20 million per month on overtime costs on top of regular levels, which pushed its overtime spending to $272 million through November. That's more than 70 percent of the annual overtime budget for the fiscal year that ends June 30, according to the city comptroller.
New York City saw a 23 percent increase in major crimes in 2022 even though there was a decline in shootings and homicides, according to the crime.
Surges in robbery, burglary and other crimes drove the increase in overall major crime last year compared with the prior year, despite the significant drop in shootings and murders.
Shootings and homicides in New York City fell in the last three months of 2022 compared to the same period last year, but other major crimes such as rape and assault rose, according to the data.
