COURIER L DT IFE, JAN. 4–10, 2019 19
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
Kind county
Brooklyn homicides reach all-time low in 2018
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
second-most 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.
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