Murder numbers in NYC lowest on record, say police

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City is approaching its lowest yearly murder rate in its recorded history with the final tally on track to number below 500, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said on Wednesday.

So far there have been 484 murders in New York in 2007, compared with 596 homicides in 2006, police said. Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the statistics at a news conference.

Since 2001 New York's homicides have dropped by a quarter. The city's homicide figure peaked in 1990 at 2,245.

In 1963, when crime statistics started to be recorded, there were 548 homicides. Before then police only recorded the numbers of murders that were solved.

Murder rates and major crime in New York have been declining since the early 1990s when New York had a reputation as one of America's most dangerous cities.

Since 2002 New York has had the lowest crime rate among the 10 largest cities in the United States, said the New York Police Department, based on data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

New York politicians, including Bloomberg and former mayor and Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, cite more police and more operations that target high-crime areas as the reason for the decline.

But some criminologists also point to the end of the crack cocaine epidemic as contributing to the fall in crime in the early 1990s and, more recently, demographic changes in the city's population.

(Reporting by Christine Kearney; Editing by Michelle Nichols and Bill Trott)