NEW YORK _ The New York City mayor and police commissioner held an emergency news conference and fired off tweets to contest a letter sent Friday by the U.S. Justice Department saying that the city is soft on crime.
"It's unacceptable," said Mayor Bill De Blasio. "It's outrageous and it's absurd."
New York City's past three months were among the safest on record, city officials said.
Police Commissioner James P. O'Neill reeled off statistics showing a dramatic drop in crime since 1993: murders down 82 percent; shooting down 81 percent; and overall crime down 76 percent.
So far in 2017, crime is down 5.4 percent from last year. There have been eleven murders in the city of 8.4 million.
"I like to think of myself as a pretty calm and measured person, and I think most of the time I present myself that way, but when I read that statement by (the Justice Department) this afternoon, my blood began to boil," O'Neill said.
The clash is the latest round in an escalating dispute between New York City and the presidential administration of its native son, Donald Trump. The Justice Department is cracking down on so-called "sanctuary cities," threatening them with loss of funding if they do not cooperate with immigration authorities.
Letters went out to nine jurisdictions on Friday. Besides New York, those targeted were the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Miami, Milwaukee, and Cook County, Ill.
The letter to New York said "New York City continues to see gang murder after gang murder, the predictable consequence of the city's 'soft-on-crime' stance."
Last week, four young men were found brutally murdered in Islip, New York, in a crime that authorities have linked to the MS-13 gang. Islip is located on Long Island and is not part of New York City.
