New York’s leaders have been rightly celebrating the city’s major reductions in murder and gun violence. But the city still struggles with a different violent crime problem: record-high assault rates. The causes are difficult to parse from the data alone, but the trend bodes poorly for long-term safety and stability.
Start with the good news. The city saw 309 murders last year, according to NYPD’s crime statistics. That’s the lowest figure since 2018, and a 36 percent decrease from the recent peak in 2021. Shootings stand “at their lowest level since consistent records began in 1993,” the New York–focused publication Vital City noted in a recent brief. The city managed at least one shooting-free day per week, on average, last year.
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But while these most serious forms of violence have declined, assaults have moved in the opposite direction. Last year brought nearly 30,000 felony assaults—incidents involving aggravating factors such as a weapon or an attack on a police officer—the highest total since at least the turn of the millennium and a 44 percent increase over 2019. There were also just under 46,000 misdemeanor assaults, a slight dip from 2024 but still up 8 percent from 2019.
Why the mismatch? In a start-of-year rundown, Governor Kathy Hochul’s office attributed the increase to “assaults on public sector employees and domestic violence.” Assaults on public workers, including attacks on police officers, accounted for about 10 percent of incidents last year, according to Vital City. Domestic violence is another 40 percent, reports the state.
The city has moved to police and prosecute domestic violence more aggressively. And NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch has spoken out about risks to cops. But the trend points to broader concerns.
New York City’s steady decline in deadly violence mirrors patterns in other major cities. Locally, it also reflects the work of Tisch and her colleagues, who have focused on targeting the people and places most prone to violence. Such precision-policing strategies have been replicated nationwide with notable success.
The strategies are effective at controlling the “power few”—the roughly 10 percent of offenders responsible for the lion’s share of crimes. Some big-city police departments have embraced this approach not only in response to rising violence but also because of officer attrition, which forces a tighter focus with fewer resources. The NYPD may be one such department: it remains down about 3,000 officers compared with 2019.
This combination of factors—more efficient enforcement compensating for lower overall capacity—can disguise problems for only so long. Police serve not only to catch major bad guys but also to be the community’s enforcement arm. (See “Thinking About Crime at 50,” Autumn 2025.) When visible police presence declines, so does the perceived legitimacy of the law—and with it, its force as a moral constraint.
That’s why the continued rise in assaults is so troubling. It appears to be driven not by serious gun violence committed by a small cohort of repeat offenders, but rather by more marginal ones—men beating their partners, individuals attacking bus drivers or police, and other low-level acts of physical aggression.
In one recent, high-profile instance, 21-year-old Nassadir Tate earned a misdemeanor assault charge for punching a man who accidentally bumped into him on a subway platform. His 55-year-old victim later died from the injuries. “Bruh I had a f—ing day. . . . So the n***a I punched died bruh,” Tate wrote on Instagram.
Tate had no prior arrest record. He was not a frequent offender but just a young man who responded to a perceived slight with violence. Such behavior becomes more common as the norms of civic life—and their most visible symbol, the police—recede.
So while New Yorkers can celebrate the drop in murders, alarming signs persist in the city’s crime data. Casual violence may not often prove fatal, but its very casualness is demoralizing.
