This area in the eastern part of the Bronx, much of it along the shore, includes some of the borough's most insular and crime-resistant communities. Even with a comparatively low baseline to start with, the crime rate there has still plummeted along with that of the rest of the city.

Throgs Neck, on a peninsula that marks the border between the East River and the Long Island Sound, was one of the few places in the Bronx — along with City Island and Pelham Bay — that resisted the descent into urban decay that began to plague most of the borough in the 1970s. Co-op City, a massive inland gathering of 35 apartment buildings and seven townhouse clusters, has its own public-safety department, an added layer of security patrols and surveillance that keeps the crime rate low there.

The overall crime rate dropped by 65 percent from 1993 to 2010 in the 45th Precinct, which covers all four neighborhoods. It enjoyed a 94 percent drop in murders over that period. One major blemish was grand larceny, which increased by 16 percent in the 17 years to 2010.

Despite the overall drop in crime over nearly two decades, which pegged the neighborhood at 28th safest in DNAinfo.com's Crime & Safety Report, there was a rise in crime from 2009 to 2010, when nearly every category of serious crime went up.