There were 466 murders in New York City in 2009, according to data released by the NYPD yesterday. It is an all-time low for murder since the current system of record keeping began in 1963.
There were 523 murders in 2008 and 496 in 2007, the previous record low. Crime dropped by 11 percent overall from last year.
“The conventional wisdom is that when the economy suffers, crime goes up, but we’ve never accepted that premise,” Mayor Bloomberg told graduating police cadets in December.
The peak murder rate in New York was 2,245 in 1990. The steep drop in murders has made New York, with more than 8 million people, one of the safest large cities. By comparison, Philadelphia, a city of 1.5 million, had 305 murders last year.
