New York City is on track to have its lowest number of murders ever

Just 286 people have been murdered in New York City in 2017, putting the Big Apple on track to have its lowest number of homicides since good recordkeeping began, The New York Times reports. The number represents an astonishing plunge from the 2,245 murders reported in 1990, with many officials at a loss to explain definitively why overall crime has declined steadily for 27 straight years. Law professor Franklin E. Zimring described the city's historically low crime rates as "utterly mysterious....