A three-year decline in shootings in the city of Rochester mirrors an overall downturn in violent crime that might run counter to perceptions.
But officials say the combined 46% reduction in shootings from a peak in 2021 can be largely explained by the return to regular routines after the social disruption caused by the pandemic.
“Think about COVID, it totally restructured American life,” said Irshad Altheimer, director of the Center for Public Safety Initiatives at Rochester Institute of Technology. “It changed our routines, it changed our patterns, it also increased stress and difficulty for the most marginalized people in our society.
“So, when you think about it from that perspective, it’s no surprise crime went up.”
It also explains why it’s now on the decline.
There were 232 shootings in the city over the past 12-month period – the lowest since mid-2020 but still higher than most of the last decade. The Rochester Police Department keeps a rolling tally of shootings, reflecting the total number of shootings between the same dates, year over year.
“Over the last four years, shootings were routine in our community,” said RPD Captain Greg Bello. “And that’s not just for the police officers responding to them that are seeing them on a daily basis, but for the community members that are being affected by gunfire on a daily basis in their neighborhoods. It’s not on a daily basis anymore.”
But it’s still too common of an occurrence, officials said.
Three teenagers were shot Aug. 12, on Hazelwood Terrace, leaving one dead. Three weeks earlier on July 28, seven people were shot during a barbecue at Maplewood Park. Two women died. And in the early morning hours of June 23, six people were wounded in a shooting at Martin Luther King, Jr Memorial Park.
Those high-profile incidents, Bello and director of business intelligence for the department Nick Petiti said, have led to a public sense that crime is worsening in the city.
“This is why you don’t see us out celebrating these stats, this is why you don’t see us out there having press conferences, because they’re still not where we want them to be, they’re not where anyone in our community wants them to be,” Bello said.
While the numbers of shootings have risen and fallen, those involving multiple victims have as well — remaining a relative stable share of the total at around 15% or less.
“It’s more of a recency bias than anything else,” Petiti said. “Those occurred more recently, they stand out, they’re at the forefront of our minds.”
Homicides overall are down year-over-year as well from a pandemic peak. On Tuesday, two deaths were reported in the Joseph Avenue neighborhood. Neither was reported as a shooting. Both are being investigated as homicides.
The data reflects a similar pandemic-era violent crime spike that much of the country saw.
For example, the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan law and policy thinktank, estimated a nearly 30% increase in homicides nationwide in the first year of the pandemic.
In Rochester, statistics for other crimes during the pandemic are a mixed bag. For example, robbery and burglary did not see any consistent spike during those years, while aggravated assault hit its 12-year peak in 2020, at 990.
RIT’s Altheimer said while the social effects of COVID were likely the largest driver of nationwide crime in 2020 and 2021, a distrust in policing, exemplified by social justice protests in that era, created simultaneous factors for increased crime.
On Tuesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a statement announcing shootings across New York had dropped 29%. Those figures compared a seven-month period in 2023 and 2024, beginning Jan. 1 and ending July 31.
It found shootings in different municipalities dropped:
- Yonkers: 57% decline
- Nassau County: 56% decline
- Suffolk County: 50% decline
- Rochester: 35% decline
- Syracuse: 32% decline
The path forward to keep violent crime trending downward is multifaceted, he said. That includes police departments fostering trust in communities, and municipalities finding ways to address root contributors to crime, like poverty.
“If we return back to a normal social condition, normal meaning what we had pre-COVID, we still need to think about interventions that can reduce crime, engagement with the community that leads to greater cooperation with law enforcement, and systems just working better overall to fulfill their goals,” Altheimer said.
The most profound spike in crime incidents relates to motor vehicle theft, with 3,943 in 2023, a more than 300% increase from the previous year. There have been 1,161 so far this year. Those thefts are largely attributed to so-called KIA Boyz exploiting a security vulnerability in KIA and Hyundai vehicles.
While the 2024 figures in Rochester do show a continued decline in shootings, dropping closer to in the range of pre-pandemic figures, they still outpace some previous years. Figures in the decade preceding the pandemic had modestly fluctuated between the low 100s and low 200s, with the pandemic-era spike beginning a consistent climb in mid-2020.
The lowest recorded number of shootings on record occurred between Sept. 5, 2010 and 2011. In that year, 122 people were shot in the city.
Whether shootings can be driven back down to numbers seen in 2010-11, when totals dropped to around 120 in a one-year period, is yet to be seen.
“We’re making incredible strides, but we’re not done,” Bello said. “We have to keep making those strides.”
