Nearly two decades ago, the city’s crack-cocaine epidemic led to headlines about gang wars, semiautomatic gunfire in schoolyards and a police blotter that showed more than six homicides a day, on average.

This year, with 428 killings logged through Sunday — 412 actual killings plus 16 crime victims who have died this year from injuries sustained long ago — the average number of killings is a bit more than one a day.

The numbers on file from before 1963 are not considered reliable for comparison because until then, many homicides were not recorded until an arrest was made and the case was closed, but ever since, they have been recorded as they occurred. There were 390 homicides recorded in 1960, fewer than this year, but any comparison would be faulty.

The killings that have seized the headlines this year appear to have personal motives at their core: An assistant has been charged with killing her boss, Linda Stein, inside Ms. Stein’s Fifth Avenue penthouse after a vicious argument; a Queens orthodontist, Daniel Malakov, was gunned down, and a relative of his estranged wife, whom he was fighting in divorce and child custody proceedings, has been charged.

In contrast to the 35 cases this year in which officials have found that victim and assailant were strangers, there were 121 in the whole of last year, officials said. The motives in the remainder of the killings this year are still being analyzed.

The dropping homicide rate raises a question of whether other types of crime are on the rise. But police statistics, which are subject to an internal auditing system in use since the early 1990s, show dips in six of the seven major crime categories, according to the department’s latest reports.

As of Sunday, overall crime was down 6.47 percent, compared to the same period last year. In addition to the homicide rate, the number of rapes, robberies, burglaries, grand larcenies and car thefts are all on the decline.