NYPD says it solves 39% of crimes in NYC — but many more on Staten Island

Data released Friday by the NYPD shows police have not made arrests in 61% of major crimes reported citywide in the past year, but those “clearance rates” vary significantly by borough.

Staten Island has the highest percentage of reported major crimes resulting in arrests, according to the data.

The NYPD had quietly stopped publishing numbers last year on how many reported crimes resulted in arrests, though it is required to do so under a 2017 law passed by the City Council. On Friday morning, the department published a slew of data from 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 following probes by the news outlet HellGate.

The data shows police reported making arrests in 39% of major-index crimes, which are categories of crimes considered serious that are used to measure an area's overall crime rate.

A Gothamist analysis of the preliminary NYPD data shows discrepancies between boroughs:

• Staten Island’s clearance rate for murders is close to 100%, and the highest in the city. The lowest clearance rate for murders is in Brooklyn, at 76%.
• Rapes (with a citywide clearance rate of 44%) are far less likely to be solved than murders (at 80%) — a disparity that’s fairly consistent across the boroughs.
• Police are less likely to solve car theft cases — which have a citywide clearance rate of 16% — than any other major crime.

The data does not represent actual convictions or account for cases that are thrown out by prosecutors or end in acquittals.

And comparing this year’s data to past figures has some issues: In 2023 the NYPD switched its crime reporting process to the more robust National Incident Based Reporting System, according to NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Information Tarik Sheppard. But the NYPD has so far declined to share the raw numbers with Gothamist, making it impossible to compare 2023 with previous years and accurately measure the department’s progress.

“They could have given you comparable data," said Fritz Umbach, a researcher at John Jay Criminal College who studies the history of policing. “There's a hundred things that they could have done with the data and that they have done in the past and they're not doing it here."

Still, Umbach said the citywide murder clearance rate of 80% is good compared to the national rate of 52%.

“By that yardstick the NYPD is doing pretty well,” he said. The NYPD is the largest and best-funded police department in the country, with about 36,000 uniformed officers and a roughly $5 billion operating budget.

Discrepancies between boroughs — like Staten Island’s much higher clearance rate for murders than Brooklyn’s — may be explained by race and income, according to Umbach.

“Nationally and historically clearance rates vary more by ethnicity and race than they do by geography,” he said.

Police made arrests in 44% of major crimes on Staten Island compared to 36% in Queens, according to Gothamist’s analysis.

The data also shows that while police on Staten Island made arrests in more murder cases compared to other boroughs, they made fewer arrests for rape. The Bronx had the highest percentage of arrests in rape cases at 52%, compared to 36% in Manhattan.

This post has been updated to include more information on clearance rates for rapes and car thefts.