The New York City police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, has noted the department’s efforts to push shootings below 1,000 for the first time since at least the early 1990s, when the police began keeping similar records. Mr. O’Neill and Mayor Bill de Blasio were expected to discuss those efforts at a news conference in Brooklyn on Wednesday.

Scores of gang takedowns this year, resulting in about 900 arrests, took violent people off the streets and made it more costly to engage in gang-related crimes, police officials said.

“Precision policing targets those people who are responsible for the violence, which in a significant amount of cases are gangs,” said Stephen P. Davis, the department’s chief spokesman. “By going after the gang members, arresting them, we recognize the resultant reduction in violence.”

Violent crime has been more persistent in some communities, especially outside Manhattan. But the Police Department, in continuing to drive down crime even as it has pulled back from heavy low-level enforcement and aggressive tactics like stop-and-frisk, has shown the value of focusing resources on stopping serious crime, said David M. Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“New York City, in many ways, convinced the rest of the country that things like zero tolerance were the way to make communities safe,” he said. “And now it’s showing the country that you absolutely do not need to do that, you should not do it, and there are much, much better and less damaging ways to work with communities to produce public safety.”