Thirty-eight percent of the murders in New York City in 2011 occurred in Brooklyn, a higher percentage than any other borough, the Bed-Stuy Patch reports. Of the 515 homicides citywide, 196 happened in Kings County, mostly in central Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, and East New York; 29 percent happened in the Bronx, “slightly less than Manhattan and Queens combined,” the Daily News reports. Three percent occurred in Staten Island.
Despite placing first, Brooklyn’s percentage of total murders was down from the year before, when homicides here accounted for 42 percent of the city’s totals.
So far this year, 136 people have been murdered in the city, a 20 percent decrease from this time last year, even though shootings have gone up six percent.
Ray Kelly attributes the decline in deaths to various tactics, such as gun-buyback programs. Murders in Brooklyn North, he said, declined at a rate three times faster than the citywide average. As for who was killed, the News reports:
About 62% of all victims [not just in Brooklyn] were black, although that demographic makes up about 23% of the city’s population… About 38% of murder victims were black men between 16 and 37 years old… One in five homicide victims were women, 54% of them killed in domestic violence incidents.
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