Broadway Records 1,036. Roosevelt Avenue Records 695, at More Than Twice the Rate
counted events per 100 homes on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, against 3.08 on Broadway and a citywide median of 1.8
NYPD complaint records, January 2021 through June 2026
Since January 2021 the NYPD has recorded 1,036 felony assaults, robberies, murders and home break-ins midblock on Broadway in Manhattan, more than on any other street in New York. Roosevelt Avenue in Queens has 695. Divide each by the homes and businesses on the street and the order reverses: Broadway runs 3.08 per 100 homes and Roosevelt Avenue runs 7.94.
A count follows the length of a street and the number of people standing on it. Broadway is thirteen miles of Manhattan and Roosevelt Avenue is one elevated corridor through Woodside, Jackson Heights and Corona, so the street with the bigger number here is the longer street. Both figures cover the whole length of each street, which is why a quiet stretch of Broadway in the nineties is averaged in with Times Square.
The comparison that means something is against streets of the same kind. Broadway's 3.08 sits against 2.03 for the major corridors, its own street type. Roosevelt Avenue's 7.94 per 100 homes sits against a busy avenue median of 2.49. Both are above their type. One of them is three times it.
Under all of that, most of the city records very little. Of the 5,856 residential streets carrying a rate, the middle one sits at 1.8 counted events per 100 homes across five and a half years, and 1,280 of them have recorded none of these four categories at all.
| Borough | Median per 100 homes | Share at zero | Residential streets |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Bronx | 3.6 | 8% | 932 |
| Manhattan | 2.2 | 4% | 612 |
| Queens | 2.1 | 14% | 1,503 |
| Brooklyn | 1.7 | 12% | 1,298 |
| Staten Island | 0.0 | 54% | 1,511 |
What the Figure Counts
Four categories, one window, one street. Felony assault, robbery and murder, which the NYPD files as crimes against a person, and burglary, which on a residential block means somebody got into a home. Since January 2021 that is 42,813 burglaries, 37,689 felony assaults, 30,471 robberies and 1,688 murders, drawn from the 985,279 felony complaints the department has published in that window. The streets we publish a page for carry 112,639 of them.
Where the event happened decides as much as what it was. A felony assault or a robbery counts when the NYPD recorded it on the street or in front of a building, and it does not count when the record puts it inside one. A burglary counts in a residence at any location code, or on the street. A break-in at a chain store on the corner is a commercial burglary and stays out, because a store is nobody's home. Murders count wherever they are recorded, since the department places very few of them at all.
Shootings sit beside the total rather than inside it. The NYPD publishes 5,743 shooting incidents in the same window in a separate file, and every one of them is already in the complaint file as a felony assault or a murder. A street page prints how many of its events involved a firearm and adds nothing for them.
None of this touches a score. A street's grade is built from complaint, crash, transit, food and tree records, and the Street crime figure is published next to that grade without entering it.
Reading the Figure on a Street Page
The block sits under the crash record and prints four things in order: how many counted events the street holds, how many per 100 homes, what a street of the same type holds, and how many of the events involved a firearm.
West End Avenue is the worked example, because it runs one block west of Broadway on the Upper West Side. West End Avenue holds 72 counted events at 0.44 per 100 homes, and 45 of the 72 are home break-ins rather than anything that happened on the sidewalk. Broadway, one turn east, holds 3.08 per 100 homes. The block decides this the way it decides the noise.
A street with fewer than 20 homes gets the counts and no rate at all. That floor is measured rather than chosen: below about twenty homes the events per home stop describing the block and start describing whatever else is on it. Of the 9,795 streets carrying a figure, 5,856 clear the floor and the rest print a count on its own.
Thornycroft Avenue on Staten Island is what the bottom of the range looks like. Its figure is 0, the reading on 54 percent of the residential streets on that island.
Note: Two streets are comparable through the rate per 100 homes, and a rate is readable against the median for the street's own type. On Roosevelt Avenue that median is 2.49 and on Broadway it is 2.03.
What It Leaves Out
Corners. A crime at an intersection is published at the intersection point, where two streets are equally responsible for it and neither one owns it. 31,905 events that otherwise qualify happened at a corner, and they are set aside from both streets and printed separately. East 59th Street in Manhattan holds 2 counted events on the block itself and 19 at its intersections.
Station houses. Rape, sex crimes and every complaint the department could not place are published at the precinct station house, so one coordinate can carry thousands of events that happened somewhere else entirely. Every patrol precinct in the city produces one of these coordinates, 78 of them in all. The 21,272 records sitting on those points are dropped before anything is counted. Broadway is one of the streets with a station house on it, and its page says so.
Parking lots. 773 qualifying events were recorded in lots and garages and are excluded. Gateway Drive in East New York shows why: it is the access road to a shopping mall, and a mall lot is a private enclosure that happens to sit beside a street rather than a place anyone's front door opens onto. Parks, transit facilities and shelters come out for the same reason.
Thin blocks. A lane with a few dozen houses can post a large rate on a handful of events. Benedict Road on Staten Island holds 5 counted events and reads 12.82 per 100 homes against 1.38 for quiet residential streets, which is arithmetic on a small denominator rather than a pattern.
What a complaint record does not carry. These are complaints filed with the NYPD, which is a different thing from convictions, and they carry no hour of the day, no lighting, and no sense of whether the street felt fine to walk down at eleven at night. A block that people do not call about and a block where nothing happens look identical from here.
The count answers how many events a street holds. The rate per 100 homes, read against the median for the street's own type, is the number worth arguing with. Look up the street you are actually considering and read both of them beside its grade.