Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is leaning hard on some eye-catching public safety stats, saying that shootings in the borough are down roughly 70 percent and murders about 52 percent during his time as D.A. The claim came in a media sit-down that later surfaced on social media and in a New York Magazine column breaking down his public safety strategy. If you accept the way his office is doing the math, the numbers would represent a steep borough-level drop from the pandemic-era peak.
Bragg reposted Errol Louis’s Intelligencer column on X, and the piece repeats Bragg’s line that “the ultimate metric is that shootings are down during my tenure, down 70 percent in Manhattan.” As reported by New York Magazine, those figures come from data the D.A.’s office has spotlighted while explaining its mix of enforcement and prevention work.
Where the numbers come from
The percentages Bragg cites are based on the Manhattan D.A.’s own counts. A July 15, 2025 press release from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office reported that, as of June 29, 2025, Manhattan had logged 22 homicides and 39 shooting incidents. According to that release, those tallies represented roughly a 70 percent decline in shootings and a 52 percent decline in homicides compared with the same period in 2021.
Bragg’s tenure began in January 2022, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and the office’s materials include the precinct-level figures that staff use to build those percentage comparisons. In other words, the impressive-sounding drops are pegged to a specific pandemic-era baseline that his team has chosen to emphasize.
How independent data stacks up
Independent data sources show a similar overall pattern: shootings surged in 2020 and then declined in later years, although the exact borough numbers depend heavily on which year you use as a starting point. The NYPD’s historic shooting incident dataset is publicly available through NYC Open Data, and a peer-reviewed analysis of 2019 through 2023 shooting incidents found citywide increases during 2020 followed by declines through 2023. That arc helps explain how using 2021 as a benchmark can produce large percentage drops in certain areas.
What critics say
Some observers caution that percentage shifts can be misleading if people are not told what the starting point is or whether the change is concentrated in a few precincts or spread across many neighborhoods. Louis’s column walks through that debate and quotes experts who argue that the policy choices made by prosecutors, mayors and police departments matter at least as much as the raw totals when people try to judge how safe a city feels…