Understanding the City of Albany's Crime in 2025

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The City of Albany data that we collected does not contain gunshot statistics, aka firearms discharges.  Firearm discharge receive anecdotal attention and we would want to understand and examine any data that the City collects.

Albany saw a decrease in overall crimes and most crime categories throughout 2025, continuing a trend started in 2024. This trend appears to mirror the nationwide decline in crime.  We want to compare Albany’s individual crime category trends to the nationwide crime category trends.

We continued to observe an increase in crimes against people, or violent crimes, in warmer months; however we do not have enough data (and this is a good thing) to draw conclusions that the increase in violent crimes directly correlates to crimes occurring at outside locations.   Locations of crimes and crime hot spots remain unchanged from our 2024 analysis.

Lastly, there is the reasonable question “Are crime statistics mirroring what is actually happening in the City?”  We would recommend this research paper that provides thoughts on the utilization of crime statistics and the cautions associated with them.

From our analysis we have several recommendations.

1. Crime Data availability.  In 2025 we noted this about the availability of crime data:

“We also feel strongly that important data like this should be readily available on Albany's Open Data site, and that this data should not require a FOIL.  FOILs are unnecessary barriers to viewing, analyzing, and reporting data collected by city employees in the form of public records.  The Albany Police Department has been the biggest contributor to Albany's Open Data site, however comprehensive crime data was not available.  It was necessary to use the Freedom of Information Act to request and obtain crime data from 2020 to the present (March 2025).”

Albany’s Open Data site became inactive for unknown reasons in January 2026.  We had to use a FOIL to obtain the latest data.  Our position remains unchanged - crime data should not be hidden behind a FOIL.

2. Leadership commentary and use of crime data.  We identified only a single time in 2025 where the City’s leadership spoke about Crime using data and statistics, a press conference by then Mayor Sheehan and Police Chief Cox, published in a May, 2025 TImes Union Story. That story reported “violent crime has dropped 14% since last June”, which overall is supported by our analysis. 

In early July 2026, Mayor Dorcey Applyrs, Albany Police Chief Brendan Cox and Albany County District Attorney Lee Kindlon held a press conference where a few 2026 year-to-date crime statistics were revealed to demonstrate crime trends.

While we may have missed one or more events where data was used by the City’s leadership to discuss crime, the use of data by our leadership to explain crime is an exceptional event, typically in reaction to a crisis or a programmatic announcement.  The City’s leadership should regularly be using up-to-date data in their communications about incidents, trends and how those drive operational actions.  Data that provides the details, and that allows for citizen validation, should be made available to the public concurrent with these communications.

3.  Leadership explaining their view of why.  We want leadership to connect the dots between an action or an externality and the crime data.  

As illustrative examples:

• “We started <some program> which we believe led to <some outcome>”
• “Our ability to fill <X number of police positions> led to <some outcome>”
• “Nationwide our crime rate appears to be going down because of <aging population, better economy, etc> and the City appears to mirror this trend

The leadership is best positioned to make their case for connecting actions or socioeconomic changes to the crime trends in the City.  It is a reasonable expectation that we should get that view from leadership.  This will help the City understand the value of the investments that we are making (e.g. the City’s Office of Violence Prevention, the need for additional officer staffing) and changes to policing methods or resource allocation.

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