Gun violence across New York City declined considerably in 2025, making it among the lowest years for gun violence in the city’s history.

City officials are touting new, data-focused approaches to policing gun violence as a key driver of the decline. Gun violence has also dropped nationally this year as a COVID-era crime spike ends and rates return to pre-pandemic levels, but New York has still had fewer shootings than smaller American cities, according to police statistics.

Experts say a variety of societal factors cause violence to fluctuate, and pinpointing a precise reason can be difficult.

“I wish I did know, ’cause I’d bottle that,” said Cincere Wilson, a violence interrupter who’s long been embedded in efforts to reduce gun violence among young people in East Harlem.

NYPD data shows a 24% decline in shooting incidents through late December of this year, compared to the same time window last year. That translates to a notable drop in victims: 851 people were hit by gunfire across the city through Dec. 28 of this year, according to the NYPD, while 1,090 were shot during the same period last year. Officials said the 2025 figures so far represent the city's lowest levels of gun violence in recorded history.

Gothamist has for two years maintained its own gun violence tracker based on police data and checked against the National Gun Violence Archive. The analysis shows at least 169 people died as a result of gun violence across the five boroughs through Dec. 29 this year, compared to 204 people through the end of last year.

For the first 11 months of the year, the city's previous record-low amount of gun violence was set in 2018, under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, when there were 828 shooting victims across 696 incidents, according to the NYPD. This year, during that same 11-month span, there were 812 victims across 652 incidents.

Christopher Herrmann, a criminologist and data expert from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has spent years analyzing shooting hot spots across the five boroughs — defined as places where 10 or more shooting incidents happened over a given period of time. Gothamist studied these areas in 2024, and found much of the city’s gun violence was concentrated on the same blocks again and again.

While 2025 hot spots still do exist, Herrmann said even those areas are experiencing far fewer incidents than in the past.

“I'm telling the computer to find, like, quarter-mile areas with 10 or more shootings,” he said. “Most of the time I would be asking it to look for 20 or more, or even 25 or more.”

Flooding the zones

In an interview, NYPD Chief of Department Michael LiPetri credited the department’s approach to these hot spots as a key reason for the drop in gun violence. He said police are not just reacting to the latest outbreaks of gunfire but are also deploying more personnel to small geographical clusters where violence is most likely to occur.

“It's not just cops on dots,” LiPetri said. “It's all the resources that we have: namely, our narcotics officers, our Gun Violence Suppression Division, our patrol officers, our housing officers, our transit officers.”

He said over the summer, the NYPD established 72 of those zones across 40 precincts, along with eight public housing districts and 10 transit districts. Then, field training officers fresh out of the police academy were assigned to patrol those areas on foot on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights — which helped deter violence when it was most likely to occur, according to the chief.

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch has often highlighted the benefits of precision policing, which uses data to focus resources on the specific people and places most responsible for the city’s crime. This year, she praised officers for “executing that strategy with the discipline and dedication that defines this noble work.”

Experts don’t discount good policing as part of the gun violence decline, but point out New York City’s stats mirror national crime drops this year.

The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom that tracks gun violence across the country, published statistics showing 17 other states and Washington, D.C., experienced drops in gun deaths greater than 20% through September of this year — including Colorado, Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey and Maryland.

“We're doing just as good as everyone else, I would say,” Herrmann said. “ I think this just kind of reflects that we're kind of back to pre-COVID or even early-COVID kind of numbers.”

Fritz Umbach, another criminologist at John Jay, agreed this year’s results could still be the pandemic crime spike fading away, but admitted it's not always clear what drives these declines.

“No one has had a better hypothesis than that, but it's going to take a couple years before we fully figure it out,” he said.

Still, the NYPD’s shooting stats are significantly lower than other large American cities. Chicago, with nearly 3 million people, had more than 1,430 shootings through the third week of December this year, according to their police data, compared to New York’s 677 incidents in the same timeframe.

Philadelphia, which has just over 1.5 million residents, recorded 825 shooting incidents with 889 victims in the same period, according to that city’s police department — more than New York City’s total of 677 shootings with 844 victims.

City hot spots remain

While New York is doing much better than other cities as a whole, not every neighborhood is experiencing the same trend toward safety. According to police data, shooting incidents and victims in Queens North — the patrol zone including communities like Astoria, Elmhurst, Corona, Bayside and Ridgewood — have increased about 30% this year compared to last. The zone had a historic low for gun violence in 2024, an NYPD spokesperson said.

A number of high-profile mass shootings also shook the city this year, including one involving a man who killed four people and himself at a Midtown office building in July, and another several weeks later where police said gunmen killed three people and wounded about 10 others at a hookah lounge in Brooklyn.

LiPetri said the NYPD would be “laser-focused” on the approaches that worked this year, along with those that “might not have worked as we expected.”

“We're always looking for new strategies,” he said. “ We need to always be ahead of the next crime trend.”

Gun violence is inherently complex. Just as a number of factors could cause shootings to spike — like gang violence, hot weather, socioeconomic stressors and even certain kinds of infrastructure problems — the reasons behind downturns are often hard to nail down.

Mayor Eric Adams often celebrates the fact that the NYPD Neighborhood Safety Teams launched under his administration, as well as other NYPD teams, have seized more than 25,000 illegal guns over his four years in office. Wilson, the violence interrupter, still works with plenty of people who have illegal guns. He said this year, instead of shooting, many of them listened to mentors like him — who convinced them not to use those weapons.

Violence interrupters and credible messengers are part of the city’s Crisis Management System, which started under de Blasio and expanded under Adams. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has said he will work to strengthen the initiative and support similar programs, which Wilson said would be key to ensuring work like his can continue. He also said he hopes the incoming mayor will bolster the juvenile court system, which can help young people find alternatives to incarceration.

Perhaps more than anything, Wilson said, there’s been a noticeable calm this year among the people he works with.

“A few years ago, it seemed like … almost every participant that we dealt with had an extreme amount of anger,” he said. “For some reason, I'm not seeing that now.”

To learn more about gun violence patterns and fatal shootings across the city over the past five years, check out Gothamist’s map.

This story has been updated with additional information from police.