New York City Crime Jumps 4 Percent; NYPD Stopping-And-Frisking At Record Pace

For the first time since 1994, crime in all eight of the NYPD's "patrol boroughs" is up.

The New York Post, who compared this year's CompStat numbers to the same period last year, found a 4.2 percent uptick in major felonies, which include shootings, sex crimes and robberies. Grand larceny has jumped an alarming 9.2 percent, an increase the Post's sources attribute to criminals hunting for iPads and iPhones, while the number of rapes has jumped 2.1 percent.

The number of murders has continued to drop, however. Whereas there were 212 murders this time last year, there have been 179 murders so far in 2012. (For perspective, in 1992 there were 2,397 murders citywide.)

Curiously, the Post's anonymous sources attribute the uptick in crime to "the recent slowdown of stop and frisks," while the most recent report finds that the NYPD is actually stopping and frisking people at a record pace. In the first three months of 2012, the NYPD stopped people 203,500 times. In the same three months last year, the NYPD stopped people 183,326 times.

In 2011, the NYPD made 684,330 stops, and of those stopped, 87 percent were black or Latino.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have sternly defended NYPD stop-and-frisks, saying they reduce crime and take guns off the streets.

The latest Compstat data reveals, however, that while stop and frisks have jumped, the number of shootings has also jumped, from 647 to 695, a 7.4 percent increase.