New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said on Thursday that the city had experienced its safest summer, when it came to murders and to shooting incidents and victims, in recorded history, but Jews continued to be disproportionately targeted in the city.
In August, Jews were targeted in 19 (42%) of the 45 “confirmed” hate crimes, a metric that the city has reported since the third month of Zohran Mamdani’s tenure as city mayor. Jews make up about 10% of New Yorkers, per official statistics.
One of the 45 “confirmed” hate crimes last month in New York City targeted Muslims, or about 2%. That was a 50% drop from the two in August 2025.
The 19 anti-Jewish hate crimes were down 13.6% compared to the 22 in August 2025, according to the NYPD.
Overall, hate crimes increased 15.8%, from 367 in 2025 to 425 in 2026, in the first eight months of the year. But anti-Jewish “confirmed” hate crimes were up 8%—229 from 212—in 2026 compared to 2025, the police department said. Jews were also targets of 53.9% of all “confirmed” hate crimes in the city so far this year.
Muslims were targets of 27 hate crimes so far this year, or about 6%.
After recording a 182% increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes in the Big Apple in January, in Zohran Mamdani’s first month as mayor, the city began publishing only “confirmed” hate crimes and not “reported” ones in February. That suggested a decline, although it was hard to compare 2026 statistics with those from 2025.
In March, the city said that it would publish both “confirmed” and “reported” statistics separately each month. The city provides a comparison between “confirmed” 2026 statistics and the prior year, but not of “reported” hate crimes.
The city says that after an incident is flagged as a possible hate crime, the NYPD hate crime task force “investigates and determines, in consultation with the NYPD legal bureau, whether it constitutes a hate crime under New York state law.” If it meets that threshold, it’s called a “confirmed” hate crime. Disclosing both “confirmed” and “reported” hate crimes “enhances transparency and reflects best practices in hate crime reporting,” the NYPD says.
Last month, Jews were targets of 25 of the 62 “reported” hate crimes in New York City, or about 40%. Muslims were targets of two reported incidents, or about 3%.
That means that Jews were targets of about 35% of hate crimes that were reported but didn’t meet the “confirmed” threshold. Muslims were targets of about 6% of such incidents.
