Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Safer Streets: Governor Hochul Announces Lowest Levels of Gun Violence on Record as Shootings Fall 61 Percent Since 2021

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that communities participating in New York State's Gun Involved Violence Elimination (GIVE) initiative reported the lowest levels of shooting incidents on record last year Year-end data shows that shooting incidents with injury, the number of individuals shot, and gun violence-related deaths across the 28 GIVE agencies all reached record lows statewide. Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse reported double-digit percentage declines in key gun violence indicators in 2025, contributing to a 61 percent statewide reduction in gun violence since Governor Hochul took office in 2021.

VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here(h.264, mp4).

AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.

PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will have photos of the event here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

There's no place like home coming home to Buffalo in the dead of winter. But the whole state is freezing, so there's no relief anywhere. But it has been - and I'll comment on that later. But as you all know, it is an honor to come back here and to do my first event with someone who's been a long, long friend of mine, since his early career and that is our Mayor, Sean Ryan. So, I'm looking forward to working with him on public safety and talking about the finances of the city and talking about infrastructure needs of the city as well. So we're going to be great partners. Our Interim Commissioner of Police, Craig Macy, thank you for all you do. And our men and women in blue, I am grateful for everything you do, and from the time you wake up in the morning til you go to bed at night, you're out there helping people during storms and trying to rescue people. And you are the reason we can talk about some really good statistics that we weren't able to talk about a couple of years ago.

And I want to thank the council members for making the investments in public safety with us, a lot of my friends are council members here as well. So, and all of our community providers who are the ones on the frontline, the violence disrupter programs, I work closely with them. My husband worked closely with them when he was the United States Attorney and worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office for 30 years. So, this is really important to me to be able to come here and say how extraordinary the numbers you're about to hear are. It's just, no one could have predicted the rapid decline in crimes all across the state, but very especially here in Buffalo.

So, it's well known that keeping people safe always has been, always will be my very, very top priority. And I'm standing with the dedicated public servants and community leaders and the men and women of the police department who have done so much. And also, you know, as I mentioned, the outreach workers who sometimes use their own life experience to talk to young people and say, "You don't want to go on this path," and those are the best trusted messengers we can find. So, I want to thank all of them for what they do and putting their energy into showing young people there is a better path forward.

But I like to check in with the police on the ground. We're here at City Hall today, but when I came back last January on another cold day, I went to the C-District and I saw the new equipment, the hotspot policing and the drones and all the other equipment we were able to help with from the state. And I stopped again at headquarters to talk about our efforts to drive down crime at a time when retail theft was high, but also car theft. Buffalo and our Upstate counties and some of the highest numbers of car thefts in the nation. So, I just want to say we've been on a long journey together. And, you know, as Buffalo Bills fans, we've never spiked the football and we also never say mission accomplished. But we're here just to take the temperature and talk about the progress that's been made and to thank those who've been involved in this.

You know, Mayor Ryan and I were talking about just a few years ago when I first came into office as Governor, everywhere was facing a real crisis of crime and violence, and the numbers were heading up exponentially in a very frightening way. It was sort of coming out of the pandemic, and I'm not sure what happened - sociologists will have to figure out what happened to society during the pandemic, but it just seemed like the wheels came off. I mean, there are so many more crimes being committed. I feel like people felt no restraints on civil order. And as a result, people were afraid - afraid to leave their homes, afraid to go out of their communities. And shootings in Buffalo had nearly doubled from the previous two years in that time after the pandemic. And these are my neighbors, this is something that was personal to me, to figure out a way to help, not just here in Buffalo, but all across the state.

So, we got to work. We enacted the toughest gun laws in the nation, especially after the racist shooting at Tops, which I've referenced many times as - we had very tough gun laws, but we found some gaps. We found that we could do more on the red flag laws, and we also need to go back and have some common sense legal reforms. Our job was to keep repeat offenders off the streets and not make it harder for judges to prevent that from happening, and we also just passed some major changes to our discovery laws last spring that are going to stop people from walking on just mere technicalities. And so all these changes and laws, but also a $3 billion investment from the State of New York. I mean, that is extraordinary. But I came out of local government, I hired a lot of Police Chiefs in Hamburg and police officers and interviewed them and knew how hard they worked every single day. And I know it's hard because you're trying to manage your budgets. You've got limited resources. You want the best technology you can possibly have and the best people but you never had a partner in Albany, and I knew that from my local days. And I wanted to change that whole dynamic and to say, "No, you do. I understand how important your job is to keep people safe, and I'm going to be your best ally."

So, over $3 billion. And I want to make sure that Western New York got its fair share. So we did $6.2 million for Erie County through our Gun Involved Violence [Elimination] Program, which is really an extraordinary program that you can just see the results every single day. Buffalo PD received directly even $2.1 million. And what's that for? It is for personnel, for overtime, for equipment and enhanced training. 14 million for Erie County to upgrade their crime fighting technology and also the Buffalo Police Department used 6.8 million to buy license plate readers, a 3D crime, a 3D printer, a scanner, public cameras and other state of the art tools. And we also invested nearly $3 million into our Buffalo SNUG program. And again, this staff, they're able to be out there mediating disputes even before shots are fired. So, it's all about crime prevention, which is making a profound difference and to connect young people to training and therapy into jobs.

Another $2 million for 17 community organizations through Project Rise that supports people out there for programs and opportunities that change people's lives. So, Buffalonians are much safer, much, much safer than they had been just a few years ago. When we compared 2025 with 2021, when I first took office, shootings with injury in Buffalo are down 67 percent. Violent crime is down 20 percent, murders are down 55 percent, and in 2025 they hit a ten year low. We're still gathering the numbers from last year, but right now we're even looking at car thefts. Car thefts are already down 33 percent and we are in a crisis situation. You have people and these are a lot of times just Hyundais and some of those less expensive vehicles. Someone might have a 10-year-old Hyundai that was stolen. They're not getting to their job as a nurse at the local hospital. They're not getting to school. They're not getting to the grocery store. So it really had an effect on people's lives - this brazen, these brazen gangs that were stealing cars all over Upstate New York. So, this is real, real progress. And as I think about those numbers, I just want to give a round of applause to everybody here and thank them for all you've done. Great, great partners.

But we're not done because one crime is one crime too many. And we're doubling down on what works. And that includes $350 million more to combat gun violence and even with the shootings at record lows, I'm still investing more to make sure those numbers stay low. I don't want to take our foot off the gas and then see an upward trend in crimes, and we're not going there. We're not going to let that happen. So, I want to make sure that we're also changing the law when it comes to one of our newer threats, which is 3D printed guns. These are homemade killing machines that you can assemble, you know, with pieces without a background check. You can assemble it at your kitchen table. And I don't want these people to convert their homes into firearm factories, which we've outlawed in the State of New York. So, we want to go after what we call the plastic pipeline, not the iron pipeline, but the plastic pipeline. And we're going to pass a law I just introduced that requires all 3D printers to include software that blocks the printer from creating a gun. So, we outlawed 3D printed guns - of course we did. But now we're saying any 3D printer sold in the State of New York must have software that blocks the capability to even create these, these deadly machines. And we'll have stiffer penalties for manufacturing ghost guns as well.

We want to help law enforcement. You have police be able to use wiretaps to get stronger cases. And also we're going to ban handguns because I also saw 3D printers do this. They could also - handguns can be already converted into semi-automatic machines, able to fire 1,200 rounds per minute, made with a little plastic device off a 3D printer. So, you can have a Glock. You can add this device and it goes from this handgun to a machine gun 1,200 rounds per minute. So, my message to gun manufacturers who think they can sell these: You're not selling them in New York. Once we pass this law, that era will be over.

But also, I want to continue working with our friends in Buffalo, you're the ones on the ground, especially our law enforcement and our violence disruptor groups. You see the trends. Again, the trend toward 3D guns was not even there a couple of years ago. The high spike we had in car thefts was not there. You see first what the trends are, what the emerging trends are, because it's like playing whack a mole. The criminals are very clever. So, we stop them from doing this over here. They're going to do something else over here. So, I want to keep the line of communication strong. If the trends are starting to emerge, let's see how we can get on them easier with our crime analysis centers and track trends across the State of New York, and put a real dent in and thwart their efforts before crimes are even committed. That's how you keep people safe. And I'm really honored again, once to work with someone who understands this and that is our Mayor Sean Ryan, who I'm going to welcome up to say a few words.

Contact the Governor's Press Office