Longer waits for needy people desperately seeking cash assistance. A spike in emergency response times. And an increase in the number of people locked up on Rikers Island. 

Those are some of the statistics in the Adams istration’s mid-fiscal year checkpoint on Tuesday, called the Preliminary Mayor’s Management Report. The more than 400-page document includes a slew of up and down indicators, tracking everything from crime statistics to how long it takes each agency to respond to emails. 

Representing information from 45 agencies and organizations, the report aims to focus on what affects New Yorkers. It captures data from the first four months of fiscal year 2024, which began July 1, 2023, and compares it to previous stats from the same period in the prior year. 

The mid-year report card is a glimpse inside the city’s operations, after a year of budget concerns and a citywide hiring freeze. And it offers a look at how New York City is doing, through the numbers.

One example, as the Daily News first reported: in the first four months of this fiscal year the city processed only 14% of cash assistance applications within 30 days, which is legally mandated. That’s down from 95% in 2021. City officials blamed the increased delays on a 70% increase in demand, they told the News, even as Mayor Eric Adams touts an uptick in jobs and a booming economy. 

THE CITY reviewed some of the other key metrics.

Crime and Public Safety

In the first four months of this fiscal year, so-called major felony crime — which includes murder, rape, and burglary — went down by 3%, although there was a 6% increase in felony assault and an 18% jump in vehicle theft. The NYPD in the MMR attributes a five-year increase of heists to certain models of cars being easier to steal. 

Meanwhile, response times to crimes are up across the board, with it taking 9 minutes and 41 seconds on average for police to respond to a “critical” crime in progress — up 40 seconds compared to last year, data shows. In fiscal year 2021, that time was 7:52.

The time to respond to all crimes in progress, which includes less-serious crimes, was over 16 minutes, almost two minutes slower than over the first four months of last year. 

Traffic deaths fell by 2.1% over the first four months of this fiscal year, from 95 last year to 91. Pedestrian fatalities went down from 37 to 31, and motor vehicle enger deaths fell from 10 to 6, according to the data. 

But more bicyclists — including e-bike riders — were killed, from 6 in the first four months of the last fiscal year to 8 during the same stretch this term. Motorcycle deaths also increased, from 22 to 29, and other motor vehicle operator deaths inched up from 9 to 10.

“Maintaining a status quo of traffic and parking lanes has reinforced the car culture, worsening safety and exacerbating climate impacts,” said Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director for Riders Alliance. “The answer is complete streets with wide bike lanes to accommodate a range of speeds.”

DOT added 1,804 bike parking spaces, more than quadrupling what the agency added in the same period last year, and added over 22 miles of bike lanes, more than 65% of which were protected.

And Citi Bike hips were on the rise, with 9% more new hips compared to last year, plus an 11% increase in bike trips by all s. Use of Citi Bike’s pedal-assist ebikes rose 47%, too.

Fire and EMS

The FDNY, which includes its ambulance and paramedic division, responds to more than 1.8 million incidents — fires, of course, but also medical emergencies and hazard complaints — each year. 

More people died in blazes in the first four months of this fiscal year — 18 compared to 16 — and the fire department again warned the public during a City Council hearing on Thursday about how dangerous e-bike batteries can be.

Last fiscal year, there were 268 fires — resulting in 18 deaths —  caused by lithium-ion batteries, which are found in e-bikes, laptops, and other devices. The FDNY did not yet have full data on fires and deaths attributed to the batteries in fiscal year 2024.

Overall, structural fires were up 0.5% in the first four months of this fiscal year, while non-structural fires were down by 24% in the same time period, data shows. 

One way the FDNYt tracks performance is the “end-to-end” average time, which starts when 911 receives a call about an emergency and ends when the first responding unit arrives on scene. That has remained at around 5 minutes for the last few years, including in the first part of this fiscal year. 

The average response time by fire companies to all emergencies went up by 10 seconds in the first four months of this fiscal year compared to last, according to the MMR.

The fire department blamed the slowdown on traffic increases, more life-threatening emergencies, an increase in emergency room turnover time and also fewer ambulances. 

The department said they prolonged the life of many existing ambulances during the COVID-19 pandemic, then took them out of commission last year — so there are fewer on the road as they await new ones.

A spokesperson for the FDNY said last year there were 466 ambulances, which was in line with pre-Covid numbers. By comparison, there were 516 ambulances on the road in fiscal year 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. 

Jail Pop Up

The number of people locked up on Rikers Island has steadily increased since Adams was elected, according to the report. The city Department of Correction’s average daily population has gone from 4,961 in fiscal year 2021, to 5,559 in 2022, to 5,873 in 2023. 

The rise comes as Phil Banks, the deputy mayor for public safety, acknowledged that many arrests could be avoided if people were given “proper resources.” 

“For many years in this country, we have looked at arresting people as the only way to actually keep order,” he told reporters during a briefing on public safety on Dec. 1, 2023. 

“The reality of the matter is that so many of these people can be saved if we give them the proper resources.”

The increased jail population also comes as the city moves to shut down the jails on Rikers and replace them with so-called borough based facilities near courthouses in each borough aside from Staten Island. 

That plan requires the city’s incarcerated population to be no more than 3,300 people in order to fit into the new jails. 

More Rain

The recent bouts of heavy rain — including the deluge in September, which was the second wettest September ever recorded — led to a 14% increase in complaints of sewer backups, with an 88% increase of backups on infrastructure owned by the city, according to the MMR.

The city Department of Environmental Protection cleared 15,000 catch basins — a 22% increase — thanks to a “data-driven” inspection program. Clogged catch basins often lead to water pooling in streets and flooding.

During this period, emergency alert programs such as Notify NYC gained over 60,000 new subscribers, likely thanks to outreach events and advertising campaigns. Those systems warn New Yorkers of probable floods, among other hazards.

Rain also played into the types of issues New Yorkers alerted the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to.

Residents reported about 19% more housing maintenance problems to HPD compared to the same four-month period last year — with every problem on the rise except for those related to heat and hot water. Other issues, like mold and leaks, were up because of heavy rainfall, HPD indicated in the management report.

Business Is Blooming

The Department of Parks and Recreation is planting, inspecting, and pruning more of its trees, partly because they settled a contract issue with its former contractor, according to the MMR. The contractor, Dragonetti Brothers, was placed under a Department of Investigation monitorship so they could resume tree-trimming work after being charged with insurance fraud, as THE CITY reported in 2022.

After that, the number of pruned trees jumped by more than 150% — with 19,351 trees pruned in the first four months of this fiscal year compared to 7,475 as of the same time last year. 

And the Parks Department also planted 110% more trees this year over last year, with 5,326 in the ground compared to 2,536 last year, according to the MMR. The trees were mostly planted in “natural areas” of parks, and that number can change year to year due to forest restoration projects, according to the Parks Department.

Parks officials said they completed 53 of the year’s projected capital projects — including a new skate park in the Bronx and a playground in Brooklyn — in the first four months of fiscal year 2024. 

Commissioner Sue Donoghue said the work of the Parks Department is “improving quality of life across the five boroughs.” 

“Working with our partners across the istration, we’re proud to have expanded our city’s tree canopy, kept visitors safe in our parks and playgrounds, and brought world-class greenspaces to neighborhoods throughout the city,” she said in a statement.