Smithsonian.com

Photo: EssG

New York City officials received a pleasant surprise at the close of the day last Monday: No one had been reported as shot, stabbed or slashed over a full 24 hour period. It was a “nice way to start the week,” Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, the NYPD’s top spokesman, told the New York Daily News. Neither Brown nor his law enforcing colleagues could recall the last time the city logged zeros across the board.

Celebrating that no one got shot on a single day may sound like officials are setting the bar a bit low, but compared to NYC circa 1990, these stats represent a utopia. Twenty-two years ago, the city logged a record 2,245 murders, with “shootings galore” in “a town where people were afraid to come out of their houses, where babies slept in bathtubs to avoid getting shot, where nursery schools ran drills, in which kids learned “When you hear the shots, drop down,’” NYPD historian Tom Reppetto told the Daily News.

At the close of 2012, the city is on pace to finish with just over 400 murders—the fewest on record since 1960. Murders are down 23 percent compared to last year, and 10 percent fewer people have been shot this year, averaging about 5 a day.

Monday’s clean streak ended at 11:20 a.m. Tuesday when a 27-year-old man was shot in Brooklyn’s Flatlands Ave.

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