New York City has recorded its fewest shootings and murders for the first half of any year in its history, according to new figures released by the New York Police Department. The data, covering January through June of 2026, points to a broad and continuing decline in the most serious forms of violence across the five boroughs. Police officials cast the numbers as evidence that a yearslong downward trend in gun violence is not only holding but deepening. For a city whose sense of safety has long shaped its politics and daily life, the milestone carried both practical and symbolic weight.
The headline figure was the number of shootings. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the department logged 322 shooting incidents between the first of January and the end of June, the lowest total for the first half of a year in recorded history. That figure edged below the previous record of 337, which had been set in both 2018 and 2025, underscoring how far the tally has fallen from the far higher numbers of earlier decades. The department tracks shooting incidents as a core measure of gun violence, and the new low suggested the trend was continuing rather than leveling off.
The decline extended to the people wounded by that gunfire. The NYPD reported 381 shooting victims over the six-month period, down from the previous record low of 397 set in 2025. Because a single shooting incident can leave more than one person injured, the victim count offers a fuller picture of the human toll of gun violence, and its fall to a new low reinforced the broader pattern. Together, the two figures pointed to fewer guns being fired and fewer people being hit across the city.
Murders followed the same trajectory. The number of killings fell to 122 in the first half of 2026, down sharply from 162 during the same stretch a year earlier, a drop that officials described as among the lowest ever recorded for the period. The decline of roughly a quarter year over year was steep enough to stand out even against the recent run of falling numbers. For families and neighborhoods most affected by violence, the reduction represented dozens of lives that were not lost compared with the previous year.
The improvement was not limited to gun crime. Overall, major crime across the city was down 5.8 percent, with 55,157 reported major offenses in the first half of 2026 compared with 58,581 during the same period in 2025. That category bundles together the most serious offenses the department tracks, and its decline suggested the drop in violence was part of a wider easing rather than an isolated statistic. Even so, some individual categories of crime have moved in different directions in recent months, a reminder that the overall figures can mask local variation.
Some of the most striking gains came in the city's public housing. The NYPD said developments run by the New York City Housing Authority recorded their fewest murders, shooting incidents, shooting victims and robberies for the first six months of any year on record. Public housing communities have historically borne a disproportionate share of the city's violence, so the record lows there were held up as a particularly meaningful marker. Officials pointed to the results as a sign that gains were reaching the neighborhoods that have most needed them.
The figures arrive as crime and public safety remain central issues in New York's civic life and politics. City leaders have repeatedly pointed to falling violence to argue that their strategies are working, even as debates continue over policing, mental health and the causes of crime. The mid-year milestone is likely to feature prominently in those discussions in the months ahead. For now, the numbers gave the department a rare chance to point to a first-half record that, by its own accounting, had never been matched.