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 with roughly five days left in the year — the first 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 15.9 percent more this year than last, according to the district attorney’s statistics.
Gonzalez’s office 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.
