New York's 1990s crime collapse (1990–2000)
NYC recorded 2,245 murders in 1990 at the peak of the crack epidemic. Over the next decade, under Commissioners William Bratton and Howard Safir, the department adopted CompStat data tracking, broken-windows enforcement, and aggressive stop-and-frisk. Murders fell to 673 by 2000, a 70 percent drop.
New York became a national model for data-driven policing. Other cities copied CompStat within a decade.
The decline continued under Mayors Bloomberg and de Blasio, even as stop-and-frisk was curtailed by courts and policy. By 2017, murders fell below 300 for the first time since the 1950s.
The 2026 numbers extend a multi-decade trend that no single mayor or commissioner can claim. Tisch's precision-policing language is a direct descendant of Bratton's CompStat doctrine.