Nearly every single city police precinct has seen spikes in crime so far this year — including five in which the rate has doubled, according to the latest troubling NYPD statistics.
“No neighborhood is safe,” one Brooklyn cop warned Tuesday. “At this rate, we will lose the city by St. Patrick’s Day.”
The only precinct in Manhattan to not see its crime rate jump was the 22nd Precinct, the one covering Central Park.
“Only the squirrels are safe,” another cop added wryly. “Tourists will never come back.”
Seventy-two out of the Big Apple’s 77 police precincts saw crime rise, leaving just five at 2021 levels or dipping below their figures for the same period a year earlier.
The NYPD CompStat numbers show that the 110th Precinct in Elmhurst, Queens, has been battered by the highest jump in crime as of Sunday, with a more than 142 percent increase over last year.
The biggest percentage hikes in the precinct were for grand larcenies, with 197 incidents so far this year after just 43 at the same point in 2021; felony assaults, which rose to 59 from 28, and robberies, with 30 this year compared to 18 last year.
Local masonry contractor Luis Gutierrez blamed the crime spree on the dire economic situation in Corona — and said he’s had enough.
“It gets worse because the prices go up, the rent goes up, the diapers, everything goes up but the jobs,” the father of four told The Post on Tuesday. “My wife is too afraid, so we move to Suffolk [County], Long Island, next month.”
Second on the crime-plagued list is Harlem’s 26th Precinct, which reported a 122 percent jump in incidents so far this year, primarily due to increases in burglaries, grand larceny and assaults.
The Manhattan precinct has seen burglaries soar to 30 so far this year compared to just seven for the same period in 2021; grand larcenies are at 29 as opposed to 15 last year, and 15 felony assaults compared to eight last year.
Last weekend, an off-duty NYPD cop was shot and wounded in the neighborhood.
“I think it’s crazy,” said Harlem resident Elizabeth Jenkins, a retired grandmother. “It’s a lot of fear because it’s all over the place, and right here, it’s really bad.”
Jenkins said soft-on-crime Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, himself a Harlem resident, is not doing the neighborhood any favors.
“I think he’s not good,” she said. “He’s not good on crime as far as I can see. He can do better. There’s a lot of crime, and he’s not really dong anything about it.”
Bragg conceded on Tuesday that Harlem “is in the middle of a crisis” but said he’s committing to taking more guns off the streets.
City worker Jose Rodriguez, who lives within Harlem’s troubled 26th Precinct, blames local police for the neighborhood’s issues.
“You hear shots, and they don’t show up. If they show up, they show up when it’s done. It’s pathetic, the response time, and they’re only a block away,” he said.
“You really don’t see them,” Rodriguez added. “If you see them, they’re parked in their car. and they don’t come out. Reality is they need to go back to the old way when they walked the street.”
The list of the top five hardest-hit crime areas was rounded out by the 107th Precinct in Fresh Meadows in Queens, and Brooklyn’s 72nd Precinct in Sunset Park and 69th Precinct in Canarsie.
This year’s city crime rise may seem so drastic because last year around this time, there was a COVID-19 surge and minimal access to vaccines, which kept many people locked up indoors, including criminals and their targets, experts have said.
But the percentage of current major city crimes remain up even from pre-pandemic levels by nearly 10 percent, with a surge in car thefts and a slight uptick in felony assaults and grand larcenies citywide, police data shows.
The precinct list compiled by The Post is based on crime percentage increases, not on the actual number of incidents per precinct.
And everything wasn’t all doom and gloom.
Three precincts have seen their crime drop from last year, led by the 122nd near Midland Beach on Staten Island, which saw its overall number dip by nearly 14 percent.
The 83rd Precinct in Bushwick, Brooklyn, reported a 5.7 percent drop, while the 79th in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, decreased by nearly 5 percent.
Two NYPD precincts — the 101st in Far Rockaway and the 22nd in Manhattan — saw crime remain on par with the 2021 numbers, the stats show.
“The NYPD’s leaders are working around the clock, in tandem with their federal and state law enforcement partners, and with the city’s five district attorneys, to devise comprehensive crime fighting measures, build solid criminal cases, and achieve meaningful consequences for crimes that tear at the fabric of the city,” an NYPD spokesman said.
Additional reporting by Kevin Sheehan, Craig McCarthy and Reuven Fenton
