A fresh crime analysis making the rounds this week is telling New Yorkers something nobody wants to hear: reported home burglaries are up roughly 60 percent compared with last year. The eye-popping figure, pulled from law-enforcement submissions, has residents and local officials scrambling to figure out what changed. In small towns and suburbs, neighborhood feeds are suddenly crowded with doorbell-cam screenshots and grainy clips of strangers on porches, while public-safety experts dig into the numbers to see whether this is a true statewide surge or a quirk of how the incidents were counted.
What the study found
The headline number comes from a review by insurance-comparison site Compare the Market, which says New York reported about 10,632 burglaries in 2025 and 17,052 so far in 2026, a roughly 60 percent increase. That finding, visible in the company’s public dataset and highlighted in coverage from NJ 101.5, is part of a broader scan that flags big percentage jumps in several states when last year’s totals are stacked against incidents already reported for the start of 2026. The study says it used FBI-reported counts to track statewide changes, a method that gives a blunt national snapshot but can also magnify percentage swings when partial-year numbers are lined up against full prior-year totals.
Compare the Market presents the burglary counts alongside other property-crime categories, framing the New York jump as part of a wider pattern that could signal shifting crime trends or simply reflect when and how departments upload their data.
City and state dashboards tell a different story
At the local level, the picture looks a lot less dramatic. The NYPD has reported that burglary is moving in the opposite direction in recent monthly snapshots, recording a 21.5 percent drop in burglaries in April 2026 compared with April 2025. The department has also said major crime overall was down citywide in early 2026. Those figures, along with trends tracked by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, raise questions about how closely the statewide spike from the comparison study matches what residents in New York City are actually experiencing.
NYPD releases and the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services’ county dashboards show declines in several property-crime categories. That pattern suggests the national snapshot and the state totals cited in the Compare the Market review may be telling a different story than the one unfolding on city blocks and in individual counties. The county-level numbers that state officials use to monitor those trends are published by NYS DCJS.
Why the numbers can disagree
Crime analysts are not especially shocked when statistics collide like this. Timing and scope can turn the same raw data into very different headlines. The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer shows property crime trending downward in the March 2025 through February 2026 window, a reminder that broad national or state snapshots often do not line up neatly with month-by-month or city-level reports…