The following is via CBS NY:

For several years, New York has prided itself as being the safest big city in America.

The NYPD and Mayor de Blasio have boasted about a continued drop in crime citywide, but a closer look at those numbers finds a disturbing trend being masked by an overall lower crime rate.

Murders and reported rapes across the five boroughs have spiked through the first two months of 2019.

According to the NYPD’s weekly CompStat reports, 51 murders were reported through Feb. 24 – a staggering 50-percent increase from the same point last year.

Authorities are reporting a 23.6 percent increase in rapes in 2019. There have been 267 cases reported through Feb. 24, with 31 coming in just a seven-day period from Feb. 18-24.

MORE: Crimes Down Overall In January, But Hate Crimes Are On The Rise

While the latest CompStat report claims there has been an 8.3 percent decrease in crime, those numbers don’t include misdemeanor offenses in their totals.

A deeper dive into those statistics find that misdemeanor sex crimes have skyrocketed in 2019, going from 459 in 2018 to 580 through the same point in 2019. That’s an increase of over 26 percent.

There has also been no change in the level of shooting incidents around the five boroughs this year.

The only area of increased crime city officials have repeatedly addressed is the spike in hate crimes. Through Feb. 17, the number of bias attacks had jumped by a stunning 72 percent from 2018.

(Source: CBS NY)