As of Dec. 29, 2013, the number of homicides recorded for New York City for 2013 stood at 332. It’s a drop of 20% below the homicide rate of 2012 (419 murders) and the first time in over half a century that the city saw less than one murder a day on average. The historical data for homicide rates come from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data.
The reasons behind the dramatic decline of the past two decades will continue to spark fierce debate. Was the drop in the 1990s due to police commissioner William J. Bratton’s focus on broken windows, or the impact of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, as famously argued in Freakonomics? And did more recent declines happen as a result of “proactive policing”—programs such as “stop and frisk” and “Operation Crew Cut“—or in spite of it?
NOTE: Readers of the original article on Quartz have commented that the above chart is misleading because it doesn’t take changes in population into account. That is true in general, but it in this particular case, adjusting for population does not do much to change how the data look and takes away from the chart’s simplicity—the point is to express the total number of murders that took place in a given year.
Nonetheless, it’s a fair point, so here is a chart of murders in New York City on a per capita basis going back to 1900.
Michael Sandberg's Data Visualization Blog 
The bankruptcy of the city, the crack epidemic & the lack of pride of their city all contributed to the meteoric rise in murders. It took such a long time to bring those numbers down. The lack of hope & pride in the city combined with a lack of trust in the police made it almost impossible to bring those numbers down. One of the things that helped bring those numbers down was the bottoming out of real estate values. That’s what made gentrification possible & almost forced social change. It’s a little hard to have pride in a war zone. I understand why the people that lived there their whole lives would resent being forced out of their homes by the rise in property values but more so the taxes. But they were able to sell their property & make a nice chunk of change that they could use to buy a new home & improve their lives. There aren’t many ghettos in New York anymore yet there are still MANY minorities living in NYC