Rising shoplifting and a rise in stolen cars in 2023 have pushed New York’s crime totals higher for the second year in a row in all parts of the state outside New York City, newly released crime data shows.
Violent crime in those places has fallen 4% since the previous year. But increasing the overall number of crimes were two well-known problems that police and state and local officials have tried to curb, including a car theft fueled by social media that rose to epic levels in Rochester and Buffalo.
What did overall crime look like in New York in 2022 and 2023?
The net result was approximately 193,000 reported crimes, an increase of 21% in two years. Much of that was due to a spike in thefts in 2022, which consist of non-violent thefts such as shoplifting.
A total of about 133,000 were reported last year, by far the largest share of the seven crime counts collected by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.
The state excluded New York City from last year’s preliminary figures because of what it said was a technical hurdle: the city changing its data collection system. Figures reported separately by New York City show that overall crime remained flat at about 127,000 in 2023, after an increase in 2021 and a jump in 2022.
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Crime peaks during a pandemic decrease. Are they back to pre-2020 levels?
Some of New York’s most alarming crime increases, which mirrored national trends during the pandemic, have slowed or reversed.
Outside New York City, the number of homicides rose in 2020 and increased the following year, but fell during the next two homicides and totaled 249 in 2023 — the same as in 2019, the last year before the pandemic hit.
The total number of shootings in Rochester, Yonkers, Syracuse and a dozen other cities and counties where the state tracks gun violence fell for the second straight year in 2023. Gun-related injuries in those jurisdictions spiked in 2020 and 2021. Rochester’s total nearly doubled in two years to 350 in 2021; last year it had dropped to 247.
Crime levels are starting to return to pre-pandemic levels, but it could take another year to fully recover from the pandemic’s social disruptions, said Christopher Herrmann, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
“My hope is that by 2025 everything will be ‘back to normal,’” Herrmann said.
Much of the continued rise in thefts can be attributed to the lingering effects of the pandemic, he argued. Police took a more hands-off approach to minor crimes early in the crisis – at least partly due to the risk of infection – and shoplifting increased as thieves saw little risk of being caught or facing jail time or harsh penalties. get if they did, Herrmann said. .
He also placed some blame on the state’s 2019 bail reforms, which largely prevented judges from jailing defendants on lesser charges while their cases were pending. Those changes caused years of political friction, with Republicans arguing they encourage repeat violations and Democrats — Gov. Kathy Hochul and legislative leaders — making a series of tweaks to the new rules to give judges more leeway.
Here are the crime totals for places outside New York City in 2023 and how they compare to 2019 levels:
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Theft: 133,047 (10.9% increase)
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Vehicle theft: 20,615 (186.6% increase)
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Burglary: 16,862 (5.2% decrease)
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Aggravated assault: 15,054 (13.4% increase)
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Robbery: 4,407 (5.8% decrease)
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Rape: 3,164 (18.6% decrease)
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Murder: 249 (no change)
New York’s worst crime problem in 2023: Kia and Hyundai theft
While violent crimes declined in New York last year, car thefts skyrocketed.
In places outside New York City, they have risen every year since 2019, reaching a whopping 20,615 last year, nearly three times as many as in 2019. And much of that number is concentrated in just two cities where crime has skyrocketed: Rochester, where 4,982 car thefts were reported last year, and 4,049 in Buffalo. The next closest count was in Syracuse, which had 1,023.
What seems to be driving this trend are technological changes that have made it easier for owners to start their cars and thieves to steal them, “sacrificing safety for convenience,” Herrmann said.
Kia and Hyundai models were the main targets, thanks to viral videos watched by young people showing them how to start the cars without a key fob. In Rochester, police have found that cars stolen during this recent wave are often simply taken for joy rides and thrown away or used once to commit other crimes, rather than being sold or stripped for parts.
In response to the spike in car thefts, Hochul last year announced $5 million in state funding for alternative justice programs for juvenile offenders, especially in three provinces — Monroe, Erie and Niagara — where crime is rampant.
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Crackdown on shoplifting: what is NY doing?
The state budget passed in April included a series of steps Hochul proposed to combat shoplifting. It included $40 million in funding for police and prosecutors to target organized crime gangs that steal from stores, including a special state police unit with 100 employees.
The budget also strengthened the penalty for assaulting a store employee, making it a misdemeanor rather than a misdemeanor if the employee is injured. Small businesses were offered tax breaks of $3,000 to pay for security measures. And police were given the ability to go after online sellers of stolen goods by making it illegal.
Chris McKenna covers government and politics for The Journal News and USA Today Network. Reach him at cmckenna@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared in Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Crime in New York rose again in 2023. What’s behind this increase? See the details
