That would really be something to celebrate — and it just might happen. Turns out, murders are down elsewhere, too.

In my corner of the world, this is nothing less than incredible:

There were days upon days in New York City when not a single person was murdered in 2009. Two such stretches, in February and March, lasted nearly a week each.

There were some pockets of the city where murder was a singular occurrence: 12 of the city’s 77 police precincts, in as varied locations as Upper Manhattan and Park Slope, Brooklyn, have logged one homicide each through Christmas.

The storyline of murder in New York is one that has been undergoing constant revision since the Police Department began tracking homicides reliably in 1963. There have been rises — the homicide rate peaked in 1990 at 2,245 — and subsequent falls. But since such statistics have been compiled and examined, there has never been as few murders in New York as there have been this year.

The city is on track, for the second time in three years, to have the fewest number of homicides in a 12-month period since 1963. As of Dec. 27, there were 461 murders; the current record low happened in 2007, when there were 496.

The murder tally has gone down despite a bad economy and predictions that crime might have hit bottom — a notion rejected by the city’s police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly. But challenges persist: With the city facing a $4.1 billion budget deficit, the police force — which has seen its head count reduced by 6,000 officers since 2001 — may have to shrink further.

“The mantra of, ‘Do more with less’ is certainly a very important principle in the Police Department,” Mr. Kelly said. “And these numbers show it.”

The decline in homicides is not happening only in New York. According to the F.B.I. uniform crime report for the first half of 2009, murders fell 10 percent nationwide compared with the same period in 2008. But New York showed a 19 percent decline in murders, the report said, and the city’s murder rate of 6 per 100,000 people was far lower than that of New Orleans, Chicago or Baltimore.

Check out the rest right here. And Happy New Year (a few days early…)