NEW YORK--New York is on track to record fewer than 300 murders in 2017, a sharp drop from the previous year and a fresh milestone in a decades-long decline that began in the early 1990s, when the annual death toll in the city exceeded 2,000 people.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, a liberal Democrat who has curtailed police policies that had sowed anger in minority communities, said efforts to improve relations in some neighbourhoods were partly responsible for an overall reduction in crime this year.
As of Sunday, 284 people were murdered in the nation's largest city, down from 329 in the same period in 2016, according to New York Police Department (NYPD) data released this week. All seven major crimes tracked by police, including rape, assault and robbery, showed declines.
Barring a spike in the final week of the year, the number of murders in the city will drop below the 333 recorded in 2014, the lowest since at least 1990, the first year for which police have posted crime statistics online.
"It tells you that New York, perhaps first among the cities in the country, has been dramatically transformed and neighbourhood after neighbourhood bears little resemblance to the city of the '80s and '90s," said Eugene O'Donnell, a professor at the city's John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former NYPD officer.
"Once 'no-go' neighbourhoods are chic and people can stay out all night," he wrote in an email to Reuters. However, police had recorded 1,416 rapes in the year through Sunday, one fewer than the same period last year but above the low in 2009 of 1,205.
Police officials emphasized that murders continued to decline, even as the city's renaissance has swelled its population to more than 8.5 million.
