New York City police are searching for individuals who shot a 23-year-old in the arm and bolted away on a moped — the latest in a disturbing surge in moped crime and the scooters being used as getaways for other crimes. 

In the first five months of this year, the NYPD has “already identified a total of 79 robbery patterns” involving illegal scooters and mopeds, nearly eight times the amount in the same five months of 2022, police data indicate. The NYPD has also received 415 complaints, nearly ten times the amount in the same period in 2022. 

Mopeds and scooters have become the “vehicle of choice” for violent criminals in New York, the police department’s commissioner, Edward Caban, said this month as the “dangerous and reckless” motorbikes are used for robberies and other violent crimes. 

The mayor’s office directed the Sun to Mayor Adams’s recent promise to crackdown on the crime. 

“Mopeds and scooters are not only endangering pedestrians when they are driven recklessly, but we have also seen an exponential increase in criminals using them to ride around and snatch property from New Yorkers,” Mr. Adams said at a recent press conference announcing a plan to crack down on unregistered motorbikes.

Mr. Adams is also pushing for state legislation that would crack down on motorbike sellers, requiring registration of motorbikes at the point of sale to help prevent illegal mopeds. 

“A moped is an easy, easy way to get away. It’s nimble, it’s quick, it’s much easier than a police car chasing you,” the NYPD’s Chief of Patrol, John Chell, told ABC 7 News after a recent teenage migrant from Venezuela, Bernardo Castro Mata, was charged with attempting to murder two NYPD officers who pulled him over after he was driving an unregistered moped. 

“Unfortunately this other night, the 19-year-old is a migrant, and he’s the poster child for what we’re talking about in terms of people who come to this country who commit violent crimes in New York City against us,” Chief Chell said. “We should have a platform that we can go to ICE and say, once they go through the process of the criminal justice system, they — violent criminals — be removed from our city.” 

The number of moped robberies committed by newly-arrived migrants is as high as 80 percent, the New York Post recently reported — a number a representative of the police department tells the Sun it can’t confirm.

When it comes to how many moped crimes are committed by migrants, “it’s difficult to quantify,” a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and member of the Council on Criminal Justice, Rafael Mangual, tells the Sun. That’s because there’s nothing in the city’s standard paperwork that “keeps track of that in some kind of systematic way.”

He says the recent migrant surge is a “plausible” explanation for at least part of the increase in moped crime. 

“You’ve got a massive influx of migrants from a lot of the same Latin American countries in which this particular conveyance is very, very popular for crime,” Mr. Mangual says, noting that in 2009 Guatemala even outlawed motorbikes from carrying passengers in an attempt to rein in the out of control crime. 

At New York City, there are a lot of issues that are “hampering the department’s ability to fight crime generally, and those things would apply just as strongly to this particular problem,” he says, noting bail reform, discovery reform, and criminals being diverted or released instead of prosecuted. 

Using mopeds makes it more difficult for police to catch suspects near the scene, since they can weave in and out of traffic, ride on sidewalks, and drive in between cars, he says. 

While the city’s crackdown on unregistered mopeds — and the push for similar state legislation — won’t hurt, targeting the moped itself may not be the most effective strategy, Mr. Mangual says. 

“What you would expect to find in this crime category is the same thing that you would find in many other crime categories, which is that the crime is driven by a really small number of very hyperactive offenders,” he says.

“So the most effective way to get at this will be to take those offenders off the street for a significant period of time. So that means increasing the clearance rate, increasing the rate of prosecution and increasing the penalties that are handed down after a successful prosecution.”