New York · Methods & sources
Know what you’re looking at.
Public complaint records, police precincts, visible limitations. The context behind every New York chart.
01 · Reading the timeline
One complaint file for each year.
Historic complaints are dataset qgea-i56i. The current year-to-date file is 5uac-w243. For each year, the extract uses the file with the larger complaint-from-date count and does not add the two files together. 2026 comes from the year-to-date file, through 2026-06-30, and is excluded from the ten-full-year comparison.
Complaint-from date is the start of the occurrence in NYPD’s description. Grand larceny remains the local over-$1,000 felony cut for every year in this extract.
02 · Scope
5 local indicators.
These are selected NYPD offense descriptions, not all recorded complaints. A shared indicator name does not make the New York and Toronto series comparable.
- Assault
- Felony assault plus assault in the third degree and related offenses. Harassment, sex offences, and homicide stay out.
- Auto Theft
- Grand larceny of a motor vehicle.
- Burglary
- Burglary.
- Robbery
- Robbery.
- Grand Larceny
- Grand larceny, the New York felony cut for value over $1,000. Petit larceny stays out.
Hate-crime and money-laundering sources have not been added for New York. Their views explain that coverage gap. The indicators above cannot stand in for either subject.
03 · Place & population
Precincts, counts and rates.
The map uses 78 New York City police precincts. Reports already carry a precinct number. The dashboard shows those totals; it does not plot individual complaint locations. Streets and place labels come from a locally hosted Protomaps/OpenStreetMap snapshot.
Every full-year indicator complaint in this extract had a precinct, so the precinct sums match the city totals.
Counts are the default. Rate per 10,000 divides the count by resident population and multiplies by 10,000. Citywide rates use annual Census Bureau city estimates. 2016–2019 use the 2010-based vintage and 2020–2025 the 2020-based vintage, so the denominator changes base in 2020. Precinct rates use a fixed 2020 Census block-group allocation.
Precinct 22’s boundary is Central Park. This allocation gives it 129 residents, so its rate is much higher than a residential precinct with a similar count and should not be read as a neighbourhood risk comparison.
04 · Source records
Follow the numbers.
Complaint data: New York Police Department, published on NYC Open Data. Precinct boundaries: Department of City Planning. Population: U.S. Census Bureau, a United States government work. This page aggregates those complaints by year and precinct and keeps five offense groups; it does not republish complaint rows.
About this data
How to read these figures
- What does “crime” mean for New York?
- Crime by precinct means the indicators New York Police Department publishes for New York (2016–2025). They are reported incident or offence counts, not arrests, charges, or a safety score. The same heading in another city is not the same offence.
- Where do the numbers come from?
- Police figures come from New York Police Department. Area boundaries come from NYC Department of City Planning · police precincts. Rates, when a denominator exists, use U.S. Census Bureau · population and are shown per 10,000 residents. A missing year, indicator, or boundary stays missing.
- How often is this updated?
- The site is updated periodically, with no fixed public schedule and no live feed. Comparable charts use full years. A year-to-date control, when the page has one, labels the partial year separately.
- What does this not show?
- Drug offences and overdose deaths are separate series, not part of these precincts. There is no single cross-city crime index. Counting rules and source links are on the New York about page.