A fresh crime analysis making the rounds this week is telling New Yorkers something nobody wants to hear: reported home burglaries are up roughly 60 percent compared with last year. The eye-popping figure, pulled from law-enforcement submissions, has residents and local officials scrambling to figure out what changed. In small towns and suburbs, neighborhood feeds are suddenly crowded with doorbell-cam screenshots and grainy clips of strangers on porches, while public-safety experts dig into the numbers to see whether this is a true statewide surge or a quirk of how the incidents were counted.
What the study found
The headline number comes from a review by insurance-comparison site Compare the Market, which says New York reported about 10,632 burglaries in 2025 and 17,052 so far in 2026, a roughly 60 percent increase. That finding, visible in the company’s public dataset and highlighted in coverage from NJ 101.5, is part of a broader scan that flags big percentage jumps in several states when last year’s totals are stacked against incidents already reported for the start of 2026. The study says it used FBI-reported counts to track statewide changes, a method that gives a blunt national snapshot but can also magnify percentage swings when partial-year numbers are lined up against full prior-year totals.
Compare the Market presents the burglary counts alongside other property-crime categories, framing the New York jump as part of a wider pattern that could signal shifting crime trends or simply reflect when and how departments upload their data.
City and state dashboards tell a different story
At the local level, the picture looks a lot less dramatic. The NYPD has reported that burglary is moving in the opposite direction in recent monthly snapshots, recording a 21.5 percent drop in burglaries in April 2026 compared with April 2025. The department has also said major crime overall was down citywide in early 2026. Those figures, along with trends tracked by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, raise questions about how closely the statewide spike from the comparison study matches what residents in New York City are actually experiencing.
NYPD releases and the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services’ county dashboards show declines in several property-crime categories. That pattern suggests the national snapshot and the state totals cited in the Compare the Market review may be telling a different story than the one unfolding on city blocks and in individual counties. The county-level numbers that state officials use to monitor those trends are published by NYS DCJS.
Why the numbers can disagree
Crime analysts are not especially shocked when statistics collide like this. Timing and scope can turn the same raw data into very different headlines. The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer shows property crime trending downward in the March 2025 through February 2026 window, a reminder that broad national or state snapshots often do not line up neatly with month-by-month or city-level reports.
FBI Crime Data Explorer notes that reporting lags, partial-year comparisons and changes in how local agencies send information to federal systems can all create big percentage swings that look dramatic but need careful reading. In other words, the math might be right while the story people infer from it is not.
On the ground: neighbors and prevention
Out in the neighborhoods, the debate over data does not change the feeling that some communities are on edge. Residents in towns that feel less secure say the numbers, whatever the caveats, match what they are seeing: message boards filled with posts about suspicious vans, missing packages and strangers tugging on car doors late at night.
Local reporting that rounded up the Compare the Market findings also dusted off the usual prevention advice. Think motion-activated lights, obvious cameras, trimming back sight-blocking shrubbery and asking a neighbor to scoop up your parcels when you are out of town. Public-safety officials routinely recommend those steps as low-cost ways to cut down on opportunistic break-ins, and NJ 101.5 lays them out for homeowners looking to tighten up their defenses without turning the living room into a bank vault.
What to watch next
For anyone trying to make sense of the burglary buzz, the safest move is to keep watching the official dashboards. NYPD CompStat releases cover city trends in detail, New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services county dashboards give a regional breakdown and the FBI Crime Data Explorer supplies national context.
As more agencies file their full 2026 totals and analysts adjust for reporting windows, the overall crime picture should sharpen. Until that happens, residents are probably wise to treat both the alarming statewide spike and the more reassuring local stats as pieces of a complicated data puzzle, and to handle the uncertainty the old-fashioned way by locking doors, flipping on the porch lights and not leaving boxes on the stoop all weekend.
