Call it a Patrol Borough Brooklyn South New Year’s miracle — two homicide numbers have been resurrected.
Officials said that 90 homicides had taken place in Patrol Borough Brooklyn South in 2009 as of December 31, when just four days earlier — on December 27 — NYPD CompStat figures showed that 92 murders had been committed in south Brooklyn.
Brooklyn South officials said this week that the December 31 number is the accurate number, not the 92, which was chalked up to a typo when the CompStat figures were tabulated for the week of December 27. It was later determined that the court deemed two of the killings “justifiable homicides” and that they shouldn’t be counted with the rest.
Police said that 90 homicides had been investigated by that date. Since no other killings took place in Brooklyn South between December 28 through the 31st, the number held.
According to the latest figures, which we are told have been checked and re-checked, Patrol Borough Brooklyn South’s homicide numbers have actually dropped by five when compared to 2008 figures.
An arson-related fire in Williamsburg and a murder/suicide on Sands Street in Brooklyn Heights brought Patrol Borough Brooklyn North’s numbers to 110, making Brooklyn’s combined homicide numbers 200.
Despite the disparity, Brooklyn still far outpaced their NYPD counterparts in the Bronx (who had 108 killings as of Dec. 27), Queens (79 slayings) and Manhattan, where 58 homicides were investigated. Staten Island had the lowest number of homicides at 16.
Yet Brooklyn’s homicide numbers were slightly less than they were in 2008, during which 207 people were murdered as of December 27, according to NYPD CompStat numbers.
High ranking NYPD sources could not find a reason why Brooklyn hosted nearly half of the city’s homicides in 2009.
“You can’t definitively say, it’s not that easy,” one source said. “It could just be a sign of the times.”
