‘Migrant Crime Wave’ Not Supported by Data, Despite High-Profile Cases

In the past month, the New York Police Department has described alarming crimes involving young men living in the city’s migrant shelters.

A 15-year-old boy, the police said, shot at an officer in Times Square and hit a tourist. Two officers were kicked and punched on West 42nd Street. A Venezuelan man oversaw a ring of criminals who rode mopeds and snatched purses and cellphones from more than 60 people, most of them women walking alone.

During an early-morning police raid last week in the Bronx, Mayor Eric Adams, dressed in a bulletproof vest over a Fendi scarf, joined officers as they arrested five people accused of perpetrating the robbery spree. “A migrant crime wave is washing over our city,” Police Commissioner Edward Caban told reporters hours later.

Some of the crimes were captured on videos that have since gone viral, leading Republican politicians and their allies to say that migrant criminals are besieging New York.

Quantifying crimes committed by migrants is nearly impossible, because the police are not allowed to ask about a suspect’s immigration status, said Kenneth Corey, a former chief of the department who retired in 2022. But police data indicate that there has been no surge in crime since April 2022, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas started sending buses of migrants to New York to protest the federal government’s border policy.

More than 170,000 migrants have arrived in the city since then, and it is difficult to know what crime statistics would show had they not come. But as the migrant numbers have increased, the overall crime rate has stayed flat. And, in fact, many major categories of crime — including rape, murder and shootings — have decreased, according to an analysis of the New York Police Department’s month-by-month statistics since April 2022.