LESS SCENES LIKE THIS: Brooklyn recorded just 97 homicides — including a fatal November shooting inside
Downtown’s City Point shopping complex — in 2018, the lowest number of murders in Kings County since the
city started keeping stats back in 1970. File photo by Julianne Cuba
COURIER L 10 IFE, JAN. 4–10, 2019 M B G
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BY COLIN MIXSON
It was the year of live and let
live!
Brooklynites outdid themselves
not killing each other
in 2018, which clocked a historic
low of 97 homicides — the
fi rst time on record that Kings
County murder stats dipped
into the double digits, according
to District Attorney Eric
Gonzalez.
This year featured 13 less
homicides than in 2017, which,
with only 110 tragic murders,
is now the borough’s secondmost
peaceful year on record,
Gonzalez said.
And although the 97 homicides
are worse than zero,
they are lower than the 222
killings across the borough
in 2010, and far fewer than
the outrageous 792 slayings
in 1991, Brooklyn’s deadliest
year since the city started recording
murders by borough
in 1970.
A big chunk of the crime
drop can be attributed to Coney
Islanders, who managed
not to kill anybody in the
neighborhood this year, after
eight murders occurred there
in 2017.
East Flatbush also clocked
a double-digit decline in murders,
dropping from 17 last
year to six in 2018, and the
number of killings in East New
York similarly decreased from
11 to six in the same time.
And it’s not just murders
that are down — crime
across Kings County fell in
seven categories, including an
8.2-percent drop in robberies,
a 4.1-percent drop in burglaries,
and 11.3-percent fewer car
thefts.
Rapes, unfortunately, went
the other way, with 16.6 percent
more this year than last,
according to the district attorney’s
statistics.
Gonzalez’s offi ce also
prosecuted 98-percent fewer
marijuana-possession cases
this year than in 2017, after
expanding the non-prosecution
policy his late predecessor
Ken Thompson instituted
back in 2016, he said.
Jail admissions also plummeted
by 58 percent since
April, when local prosecutors
began requesting judges release
defendants on trial for
misdemeanor violations without
bail, according to the district
attorney.
Kind county
Brooklyn homicides reach
an all-time low in 2018
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