JNS
“If the pattern holds over time and continues to grow as the months get warmer, then you start to look at things that changed at the turn of the year that might have explained it,” Rafael Mangual, of the Manhattan Institute, told JNS.
As of Feb. 23, the Baltimore Police Department has reported more homicides (17) and non-fatal shootings (38) so far this year than it did in the same interval in 2025, where there were 15 homicides and 33 non-fatal shootings. And the New York City Police Department said that anti-Jewish hate crimes were up 182% in the city in January, the first month of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty, over January 2025.
But despite unseasonal snowfall and cold temperatures on the East Coast in 2026—a factor that figuratively tends to chill the volume of crime—it’s too soon to say whether there is actually a trend of rising crime this year in either city, according to Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of its City Journal who studies urban crime.
“It’s almost universally true that crime declines in the cold weather months and rises in the warm weather months,” Mangual, a member of the independent Council on Criminal Justice, told JNS. “Part of that is just fewer opportunities. There are fewer people on the street.”
“People are not going out as much,” he said. “In the summer months, particularly in rougher areas of the city, you’ll have more people hanging out outside, drinking, partying, sidewalk barbecues, and those tend to be sites where disputes arise or people, who have had ongoing disputes, run into each other, and there you tend to see more violence. You tend to see more robberies, because you tend to see more people shopping.”
When there’s a polar vortex or a massive snowstorm in the winter, “you should expect to see an even steeper decline on those dates,” Mangual told JNS.
“I wouldn’t say that you should expect it to even out. It’s not as if there is a preset amount of crimes that offenders want to commit, so they seek to make up for lost time when the weather warms up,” he said.
Generally speaking, Mangual added, “depending on how steep the decline is during a particularly intense winter, you should see an overall decline.”
Even though the month isn’t over, there has been more snow so far this year in New York City, as measured in Central Park (23.9 compared to 10.1 inches) and in the Baltimore area (13.4 compared to 12.7 inches) than in January and February 2025, according to data from the National Weather Service, a federal agency.
Temperatures have also been colder. In Central Park, the average temperature (30.4 degrees) and average low (24.7 degrees) in January 2026 were lower than those numbers in January 2025: 31.2 and 25.9 degrees, respectively. And so far in February, per the federal agency, the Central Park average has been 30.3 degrees and an average low of 24.5 degrees, some five degrees below the statistics in all of February last year, 35 and 29.1, respectively.
Baltimore has also seen lower temperatures. In January 2026, the average was 30.5 degrees, with an average low of 21.9 degrees, slightly below the 30.3 and 22.2 degrees, respectively, in January 2025. The changes in February so far have been more than five degrees. The Baltimore area average so far is 32.1 degrees and an average low of 24.8 degrees, compared to 37.6 degrees and an average low of 28.9 degrees last year.
The crime statistics and the weather data so far this year aren’t enough data to indicate whether there is a trend developing, according to Mangual.
“I don’t think so. No. The baseline number is so low that that kind of fluctuation could be attributed to a number of things, including just random chance,” he told JNS. “It’s not the sort of thing that I would attribute to a particular policy direction, and I don’t think it’s something that you could derive a trend from from an analytical standpoint.”
“If the pattern holds over time and continues to grow as the months get warmer, then maybe you start to look at things that changed at the turn of the year that might have explained it,” he said. “But I don’t think that one month, two months in, a change of two homicides over a 60-day period is really something you can glean a whole lot from.”
That doesn’t mean that Mamdani’s rhetoric about Jews isn’t a factor in a city that has long seen anti-Jewish hate crimes take up the “lion’s share” of overall hate crimes, according to Mangual.
“There is no question that New York has struggled with antisemitic hate crimes in particular, but the increase over such a short time with such a low baseline, it’s just not something that I think you can read too much into,” he said.
“I certainly wouldn’t dismiss the potential role that the rhetoric of a jurisdiction’s leadership might have on the conduct of offenders,” he added. “There is research showing that offenders are absolutely aware of and follow policy developments.”
As cities lower the age of criminal responsibility, he said, gang members pass along more responsibility to younger conspirators, “knowing that they will be spared the harshest consequences.”
Police officers are very responsive to leadership’s rhetoric, according to Mangual. “To the extent that they do not feel like they have the support or a mandate for proactive enforcement from leadership, I would absolutely expect to see enforcement backed off of, particularly proactive enforcement,” he told JNS. “Measures like self-initiated investigatory stops, traffic stops, summons enforcement. That sort of thing.”
“One of the things that I worry about with a mayor like Zohran Mamdani is that his rhetoric could ultimately put more distance between him and the NYPD and really make that relationship more frigid that it needs to be, and that could absolutely translate into a pullback of sorts,” he said.
The winter coldness is a “confounding factor” in evaluating whether that pullback is happening already, according to Mangual, who thinks it’s an open question how much longer Jessica Tisch will remain New York City police commissioner, including if Mamdani makes good on campaign promises to take disciplinary authority over police officers away from the commissioner and transfer it to the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board.
If he does give that authority to the CCRB, that would be “not just a disaster from a policy perspective,” Mangual said. “I think it would also be a deal breaker for someone like Tisch.”
“Eliminating and abolishing the gang database, I think, would be another example of this,” he said. “We’ll see how long he keeps his powder dry on some of those bigger campaign promises.”
In the early days of Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty, despite someone as “venerated” as Bill Bratton at the NYPD helm, it “didn’t stop an entire cathedral full of officers from turning their backs to de Blasio when he spoke at an officer’s funeral,” Mangual told JNS.
“It will be interesting to see the degree to which Zohran Mamdani seeks out the police department as a partner or reverts to what I think is probably his more natural disposition, which is to view the department as an opponent,” he said.
‘Widespread concern’
James Donny Moses, director of the media relations section for the Baltimore Police Department, told JNS in January that the department and its partners “will take every measure to continue reducing violent crime in 2026 and in the years to come.”
Caren Leven, executive director of the Baltimore Zionist District, told JNS last month that “even with progress in reducing violent crime, widespread concern about antisemitism, combined with early reports of homicides this year, leaves many families cautious rather than reassured.”
“The Jewish community expects elected officials and law enforcement not only to maintain gains in crime reduction but to take antisemitism seriously as a public safety issue and respond with urgency, visibility and accountability,” she said.
Rabbi Nochum Katsenelenbogen, director of the Chabad of Owings Mills, Md., told JNS that “the safety of every human life is a sacred Jewish value, and any loss of life is heartbreaking.”
“At the same time, the Jewish community in Owings Mills remains strong, engaged and vigilant,” he said. “We are careful and responsible. We work closely with law enforcement, and we take security seriously, but we are not afraid, and we refuse to let fear define who we are.”
