NYPD data shows hate crimes in New York City climbed 9.4% this year with Jewish residents, just 10% of the population, targeted in more than half of all incidents, drawing fierce criticism of Mayor Zohran Mamdani's leadership.

New York's seven major crime categories all fell this year, some by double digits. Shootings dropped. Murders dropped. Burglaries, auto thefts, robberies, grand larceny, and felony assaults all declined. But one category moved in the opposite direction: hate crimes, and Jewish New Yorkers bore the brunt of the surge, NYPD statistics released Monday showed.

The numbers are stark. Year-to-date, the city recorded 360 confirmed hate crimes, up from 329 during the same span last year. Of those 360 incidents, 205, or 56.9%, were antisemitic. That marks an 8.5% increase over the 189 antisemitic hate crimes logged during the same period the prior year. Jewish New Yorkers make up roughly 10% of the city's population.

Put differently: a community that accounts for one in ten New Yorkers absorbed nearly six in ten hate crimes. And the trajectory is getting worse, not better, under a mayor whose own rhetoric on Israel and Jewish-related issues has drawn sustained criticism from Jewish leaders across the political spectrum.

Jewish leaders point directly at Mamdani's record

Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Antisemitism and a former state Assembly member from Brooklyn, placed responsibility squarely on the mayor.

"People take their cue from the mayor. He's creating fear in the Jewish community."

Hikind's accusation reflects a pattern of concern that predates the latest data release. Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel, has accused Israel of committing a "genocide" during the war in Gaza and called for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He skipped the annual Israel Day Parade in May, instead touting his 2029 re-election bid and riding his bicycle. He has refused to condemn the phrase "globalize the intifada", a slogan that many Jewish organizations consider a direct incitement to violence against Jews worldwide.

Moshe Spern, president of United Jewish Teachers, framed the disconnect between falling crime and rising hate as a leadership failure, not a statistical accident.

"When one community is being attacked at this disproportionate rate while the rest of the city gets safer, that is not random. It is a failure of leadership."

Spern went further, calling on Mamdani to change course.

"Jewish New Yorkers have every right to expect that their safety will be treated as a priority, not an afterthought. The mayor must stop the rhetoric that fuels hostility and start treating antisemitic violence with the urgency it demands."

Even elected Democrats have broken with the mayor on this front. Assemblyman Sam Berger, an Orthodox Jewish Democrat from Queens, offered a blunt assessment of Mamdani's first six months in office.

"In his first six months in office, antisemitism has only gotten worse. It's hard to claim progress when hate keeps setting new records."

Mamdani responds with boilerplate while critics demand specifics

Asked Monday about the hate crime surge during an unrelated press conference in the Bronx, Mamdani acknowledged the disproportion but offered little beyond general assurances.

"We know that while Jewish New Yorkers comprise a minority of our population, they continue to comprise a majority of the victims of hate crimes. And that is unacceptable. The work to uproot antisemitism out of this city is one that will continue until we see hate crimes come to an end in the city."

The statement tracks closely with his earlier remarks after a pair of stabbing attacks rattled the Upper West Side on July 23. In those attacks, a 51-year-old man named Raul Morales allegedly stabbed a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke and an Asian man in back-to-back assaults, allegedly screaming "Allahu Akbar" during the attacks. When pressed about outrage from Jewish leaders following the stabbings, Mamdani said the city has "no tolerance for hatred of any kind."

Critics note the gap between words and action. Mamdani's administration increased the budget for the Mayor's Office of Hate Crime Prevention by 800%, an additional $26 million. Yet the hate crime numbers kept climbing. The budget increase raises an obvious question that the administration has not answered: what, specifically, has the money produced? The NYPD data suggests the answer so far is not enough.

Mamdani's office did not respond to a request for comment from the New York Post. His chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, has drawn scrutiny of his own, Kassem previously represented an al Qaeda tanker-bombing pilot, a background detail that has done nothing to quiet concerns about the administration's posture toward threats against Jewish New Yorkers.

Overall crime fell sharply, making the hate crime spike harder to explain away

The broader crime picture in New York City is, by most measures, dramatically improved. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch highlighted those gains in a statement, noting the NYPD managed an "unprecedented series of major and overlapping events" over the summer, including the NBA Finals, the World Cup, Sail250, and the nation's largest Fourth of July celebration.

"Through it all, even as the demands on this department reached historic levels, the men and women of the NYPD delivered double-digit declines in major crime and record lows in violent crime across the city."

Tisch credited the results to "data-driven precision policing" and the dedication of NYPD officers. The numbers back her up on the major crime front. Shootings in July fell 21.3% and declined in every borough. The city recorded 59 shooting incidents in July, compared to 243 in July 2020, a 75% drop. Year-to-date, shootings fell 7.5%, from 771 incidents in the first seven months of 2020 to 381 this year.

Murders dropped 32.3% in July and 22.8% for the first seven months of the year. Burglary, auto theft, robbery, grand larceny, and felony assault all fell, with declines ranging from 0.4% to 25.3%.

That context makes the hate crime trend all the more conspicuous. When every major crime category is falling and hate crimes are rising, with one community absorbing a wildly disproportionate share, the problem is not a general public safety breakdown. It is something more specific. And it is happening on Mamdani's watch, under a mayor whose public statements about Israel, about Jewish political concerns, and about the language used by anti-Israel activists have repeatedly alienated the communities now bearing the cost.

City Council Speaker calls the spike "unacceptable" but stops short of naming Mamdani

City Council Speaker Julie Menin, the Council's first Jewish Speaker, issued a statement after the data became public. She called the numbers "deeply concerning" and "very troubled" by the spike.

"This data underscores why as the Council's first Jewish Speaker, my very first initiative was a Five-Point Plan to Combat Antisemitism. I will not waver in the fight to protect our communities from hatred."

Menin conspicuously did not name Mamdani or assign blame to the mayor's rhetoric. That silence is itself notable. When an elected official from the mayor's own party launches an antisemitism initiative as her "very first" act in office, it signals the problem was already urgent before the latest data confirmed it. Menin's plan, however, remains short on publicly available details, the specific components of her "Five-Point Plan" have not been laid out in the reporting.

Mamdani's broader record continues to generate friction well beyond the hate crime debate. His administration has drawn criticism for sweeping tax proposals and for a city immigrant heritage map that omitted Little Italy, Irish, and Jewish neighborhoods, a controversy Mamdani deflected onto the prior Adams administration. Senator Tommy Tuberville has gone so far as to predict Mamdani would eventually face consequences for his conduct in office.

Thirty-three hate crimes were recorded in July alone. The stabbings on the Upper West Side, in which a man allegedly targeted victims based on their faith and ethnicity, landed in the same month. And the mayor who has spent his first six months in office picking fights with Israel, skipping Jewish community events, and declining to condemn inflammatory anti-Israel slogans responded to all of it with boilerplate about "no tolerance for hatred of any kind."

An 800% budget increase for a hate crime prevention office means nothing if the mayor's own conduct sends the opposite message. Jewish New Yorkers are not asking for more money. They are asking for a mayor who acts like their safety matters, and the numbers say this one has not delivered.