Night-time safety · New York City · data through June 2026

Is New York safe at night?

47% of New York's reported incidents happen between 6pm and 6am, and 17% of them fall between midnight and 6am. That share swings from 29% to 62% depending on which neighborhood you are in — which is the whole point: the question worth asking is not whether New York is safe after dark, but where and by which route.

These figures describe when reported incidents happen, not how dangerous a street is. Somewhere with a night-time crowd reports more after dark because more people are there — that is a fact about footfall as much as about risk, and it is why the tables below show the count and the share side by side.

Most reported reported incidents after dark

Neighborhood	6pm–6am	Share	Index
1 Midtown-Times Square	3,587	48%	17/100
2 Mount Hope	3,220	55%	19/100
3 Fordham Heights	3,193	51%	19/100
4 Midtown South-Flatiron-Union Square	3,191	46%	19/100
5 Hell's Kitchen	2,810	52%	22/100
6 Mount Eden-Claremont (West)	2,695	51%	21/100
7 Melrose	2,551	46%	20/100
8 Greenwich Village	2,420	44%	23/100
9 Morrisania	2,388	50%	23/100
10 Brownsville	2,151	49%	24/100
11 East Harlem (North)	2,150	48%	24/100
12 Harlem (North)	2,107	47%	25/100
13 Harlem (South)	2,095	46%	25/100
14 Lower East Side	2,041	49%	26/100
15 Mott Haven-Port Morris	2,014	48%	25/100
16 Ocean Hill	2,011	49%	26/100
17 University Heights (North)-Fordham	2,004	49%	26/100
18 Chelsea-Hudson Yards	1,989	52%	28/100
19 Concourse-Concourse Village	1,982	48%	26/100
20 Gramercy	1,981	40%	25/100
21 SoHo-Little Italy-Hudson Square	1,954	38%	24/100
22 Longwood	1,950	47%	26/100
23 Claremont Village-Claremont (East)	1,949	52%	28/100
24 Tremont	1,937	51%	27/100
25 East Village	1,915	49%	28/100

Changes most after dark

Ranked by the share of reported incidents that fall between 6pm and 6am, against a New York median of 48%. A high share is not a high total — a quiet neighborhood whose few incidents mostly happen at night sits near the top — so the count is shown beside it.

Neighborhood	Night share	Incidents	Index
Sunset Park (West)	62%	1,099	57/100
Woodside	61%	1,516	51/100
Inwood	60%	1,901	44/100
North Corona	58%	2,277	38/100
Jackson Heights	58%	1,946	43/100
Bushwick (West)	57%	2,882	34/100
East Flushing	56%	365	80/100
Pelham Bay-Country Club-City Island	56%	373	80/100
Mount Hope	55%	5,805	19/100
Sunset Park (Central)	55%	2,160	41/100
Astoria (Central)	55%	1,672	47/100
Corona	55%	1,895	42/100

Least night-weighted

Where what gets reported is most concentrated in daylight hours.

Neighborhood	Night share	Incidents
Todt Hill-Emerson Hill-Lighthouse Hill-Manor Heights	29%	25
Tribeca-Civic Center	30%	4,129
Financial District-Battery Park City	33%	2,435
Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill	34%	2,014
East Midtown-Turtle Bay	34%	2,677
Upper East Side-Yorkville	34%	2,203
Tottenville-Charleston	35%	143
New Springville-Willowbrook-Bulls Head-Travis	36%	53

Common questions

Is New York safe to walk at night?

47% of New York's reported incidents happen between 6pm and 6am, and 17% fall in the small hours between midnight and 6am. That is a description of when incidents are reported, not a verdict on the city: the figure varies far more between neighborhoods than it does between cities, from 29% to 62% here. The useful question is which neighborhood and which route, not whether a whole city is safe.

Which neighborhood in New York has the most reported crime at night?

Midtown-Times Square, with roughly 3,587 reported incidents between 6pm and 6am — 48% of its total. Somewhere busy usually tops this list because more people are out, so read it alongside the daytime picture on its own page rather than on its own.

Which neighborhood changes most after dark?

Sunset Park (West) is the most night-concentrated in New York: 62% of what is reported there happens between 6pm and 6am, against a New York median of 48%. A high share does not mean a high total — a quiet neighborhood whose few incidents mostly happen at night will rank high here — which is why the table shows the count beside it.

How does SafeRoute use this at night?

The app scores each walking route against the same NYPD data, and can weight it toward the time you are actually walking rather than a flat all-day average. It also shows how much of each route runs on lit streets, and lets you share a walk and check in on arrival.

Methodology

Every incident reported to the NYPD carries an occurrence time, which is bucketed into daytime (6am–6pm), evening (6pm–midnight) and the small hours (midnight–6am), split weekday against weekend, and weighted by severity so violence counts for more than shoplifting. A neighborhood's night share is the weighted proportion falling between 6pm and 6am; its night count is that share applied to its total. The city-wide chart weights each neighborhood by its own volume, so a busy centre is not averaged against a quiet suburb as though they were the same size.

Each incident reported to the NYPD (via NYC Open Data) is weighted by severity — violence counts for more than shoplifting. For every neighborhood we sum weighted incidents within 1 km of its center (2020 Neighborhood Tabulation Area centroids), and normalize against citywide crime rates onto a 0–100 index, higher = safer. Time-of-day charts use NYPD incident timestamps, severity-weighted. Pages regenerate as new data is published.