Major crime in New York City plummeted during the first two weeks under strict stay-at-home orders, but some neighborhoods are seeing more significant decreases than others.
Some poorer areas also hard hit by coronavirus have seen burglaries or car thefts rise in the first two weeks under stay-at-home orders, which began on March 22, according to an analysis of weekly crime statistics from the New York Police Department.
Across East and Central Harlem, for example, burglaries rose 18% during the first two weeks of shelter-in-place compared to the two weeks before the mandate. In southeast Queens, the borough with the highest rates of COVID-19 in the city, car thefts rose 50% in that same timespan.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that communities of color are going to get hit the hardest,” said Donovan Richards, a Democratic city councilman from Queens and chair of the council’s public safety committee.
The coronavirus outbreak has hit the city’s outer boroughs, specifically poorer minority and immigrant communities, particularly hard. This week, Mayor Bill de Blasio and city health officials released preliminary data showing that two-thirds of people who’ve died of the disease were black or Latino, despite accounting for only half of the city’s population.
As of Thursday afternoon, there were nearly 88,000 confirmed cases of the virus in New York City, and 4,778 deaths.
Higher rates of disease and sweeping unemployment in neighborhoods suffering from higher rates of poverty even in the best of times “is a recipe for disaster,” Richards said. “Crimes of poverty are certainly going to increase.”
See: Blacks, Latinos in NYC disproportionately fall victim to coronavirus
Despite upticks in burglaries and, in some places, auto thefts, overall crime has fallen in every borough, in most cases dramatically, under the stay-at-home order.
MarketWatch used public crime data to analyze the change from the two weeks mostly preceding Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s stay-at-home order, from March 9 to March 22, to the next two weeks, from March 23 to April 5, when the city had ground to a halt.
In the two weeks with New York “on pause,” there were 2,147 major crimes—which range from murder and felony assault to grand larceny—a 33% decline from the two weeks immediately prior.
“Crime has dropped off the face of the map really since the social distancing went into effect,” Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, said in a public briefing to NYPD officers last week. “As hard as EMS is working on a lot of fronts, our radio calls are actually down, the ones that get funneled to the NYPD.”
Unsurprisingly, Manhattan South, or the section of the borough below Central Park, has seen the most dramatic free fall in major crimes, which dropped 54% in the two weeks under lockdown compared to the preceding two weeks, as tourism dried up and hordes of employees who typically descend on the area’s office buildings each day were laid off or worked from home.
Midtown North has seen major crimes swan dive 80% during that time, as Times Square has become an unfathomable ghost town since the stay-at-home order.
But some neighborhoods aren’t feeling the reprieve in crime quite as strongly.
The drop-off in crime in Queens South, where rates of Covid-19 infection are also particularly high, has been more muted. Major crimes fell 25% in that subsection of Queens, which stretches from Kew Gardens to Kennedy Airport and the Rockaways, under quarantine, our analysis shows.
Some crimes there have even increased, including thefts of cars and motorcycles. The NYPD reported 42 cases of grand larceny auto in the first two weeks under stay-at-home orders, a 50% increase from the previous two weeks.
Exposed to the city and potential infection on the streets, the NYPD has faced its own crisis, with nearly 20% of the police force calling out sick, while more than 2,600 civilian and uniformed members had official diagnoses as of Thursday out of roughly 55,000 employees. No one from the department was made available for comment for this story, but a news release about last month’s crime statistics noted an uptick in burglaries, despite the overall decline in major crimes.
