61% of serious crimes recorded in New York City in 2023 have not resulted in an arrest, according to data released by the NYPD on Friday.
According to the statistics, 39% of major-index offenses—serious crimes that are used to gauge an area’s overall crime rate—reported that police had made an arrest.
Murders had a much higher chance of being solved (at 80%) than rapes (at 44%), a difference that was mostly consistent throughout the boroughs. Car theft cases had a 16% citywide clearance rate, which made them the least likely crime type to be solved by law enforcement.
The greatest murder clearance rate in the city was found on Staten Island, where it approached 100%. Brooklyn, on the contrary, recorded the lowest murder clearance rate, at 76%.
The data also reveals that Staten Island police arrested more people in murder cases than in any other borough, yet in the borough fewer people were held in custody for rape. At 52% of rape case arrests, the Bronx had a higher rate than Manhattan (36%).
The NYPD was compelled by a 2017 City Council legislation to disclose the number of reported offenses that resulted in arrests, but it had discreetly ceased doing so last year. However, following investigations by the news site HellGate, the department released a plethora of data from 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 on Friday morning.
