By Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Never in modern history have so few people gotten killed in New York.
The city is on pace to finish the year with the fewest murders since the police department started tracking killings in 1963, officials said Monday.
With just a few days left in the year, there were 461 murders in 2009. The previous low, set in 2007, was 496. The city logged its most murders, 2,245, in 1990.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced the news at a Beacon Theater graduation ceremony for 250 New York Police Department recruits.
The 2009 murder count is down 11 percent from last year, they said. Nearly all major crime categories — rapes, robberies, burglaries, grand larcenies and car thefts — also dropped this year. The only exception is felony assaults, which are up 2 percent.
Overall, the city’s major-crime rate dipped 11 percent.
Bloomberg noted that the most recent reduction occurred during a economic downturn.
“The conventional wisdom is that when the economy suffers crime goes up, but we’ve never accepted that premise,” Bloomberg said.
Kelly, who has had to deal with a steady decrease in the ranks of the New York Police Department, said “persistence and professionalism were the watch words of the NYPD in 2009.”
He has credited two relatively new initiatives: Operation Impact, which floods high-crime areas with rookie officers, and the Real Time Crime Center, which delivers information to street officers and detectives as they respond to crimes.
