The frigid cold and piles of snow in New York City are turning out to be friends of sorts with the NYPD.
An extended stretch of subfreezing weather, combined with heavy snowfall, has led to a drop in serious crimes for the month of January, according to the NYPD and law enforcement experts.
“The most effective police officer out there these days is Jack Frost,” quipped former NYPD Assistant Chief Patrick Conry.
Snow, ice and freezing cold, sometimes hovering close to 0 degrees, or any sort of out-of the ordinary weather, can mean potential criminals decide to stay off the streets, lessening the chance they’ll have bad interactions with the public, the experts told Newsday.
“Cold and snow and extreme heat [ in the summer] keep people indoors,” said Chris Herrmann, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Burglars tend to stay indoors, as do their potential victims, and robbers realize that they can’t make fast getaways after they pull off a heist, noted Herrmann.
Overall, the nation and the city have experienced a decrease in serious crimes that has been enhanced by the cold weather, he said.
Except for Tuesday and Wednesday, when the highs in the city are forecast to top out at 37 and 34 respectively, the highs will remain below freezing through at least Monday, with temperatures in the single digits Saturday night, according to the National Weather Service.
Statistics released Monday by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch indicated that January was one of the safest on record. Compared to January 2025, last month saw fewer shooting incidents, fewer shooting victims and fewer homicides, according to Tisch.
The data showed that overall serious felonies dropped about 7% in January compared with the same month last year, led by a 27.8% dip in burglaries and a 16% decrease in retail theft.
“Certainly freezing, cold weather makes crime rates go down, but that happens every year,” Tisch said in an interview Monday morning on Good Day New York.
Except during the current cold snap, the crime decreases appear sharper. A deep dive into available CompStat data showed that in the week up to and including the snowstorm on Jan. 25 — the latest period for which data was available — burglaries dropped 34% citywide from the same seven-day period in 2025. The drop was as much as 55% in parts of Queens, with no burglaries reported on Staten Island.
Scott Munro, head of the Detective’s Endowment Association, agreed that cold weather has led to a reduction in burglaries, along with a special antiburglary initiative in Queens.
Tisch attributed some of the drop in shootings in January to the NYPD’s winter violence reduction plan, in which up to 1,800 uniformed officers have been deployed to night patrols in 64 zones, encompassing 33 precincts, public housing areas and the subways. The plan has cut serious crime by 36.3% in the zones, according to Tisch.
But Joseph Giacalone, a former NYPD detective sergeant who now teaches at Pennsylvania State University-Lehigh Valley, said the NYPD should be careful about reading too much into the January crime figures, particularly with looming cuts in some police overtime, which can lead to the scaling back of violence-reduction initiatives.
Anthony M. DeStefano has been a reporter for Newsday since 1986 and covers law enforcement, criminal justice and legal affairs from its New York City offices.