Mayor Bloomberg got more good news for his re-election bid yesterday as he released crime statistics from the FBI that show crime declined in the first half of the year in every borough and that the city is on track to have its lowest murder rate.

The FBI Uniform Crime Index Report found the city had a 5% decline in overall crime in the first six months of the year and will probably finish the year with fewer than 600 homicides for the third year in a row. One of the planks in Mr. Bloomberg’s re-election platform is the city’s plunging crime rate.

“The remarkable drop in crime shows that our strategy of focusing on problem people and problem places is working,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters in Brooklyn yesterday.

The crime statistics in the first half of the year, compared to the first six months of 2003, also showed:

* Car theft was down 11.5%
* Burglary was down 8.6%
* Robbery was down 6.7%
* Rape was down 5.1%
* Murder was down 4.4%

The FBI also broke down the figures by borough, with the number of recorded major crimes down 7.5% in Queens, 4.7% in Brooklyn, 4.3% in Staten Island, 3.3% in the Bronx, and 2.9% in Manhattan.

In a dramatic illustration of the trend, the FBI figures shows the 77th Precinct in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, has experienced an overall drop of 26% in major crime in the past three years.

Mr. Bloomberg credited, among other things, Operation Impact, an initiative aimed at reducing and preventing serious and violent crimes by deploying 1,000 police officers to targeted areas every day. The operation focuses on gangs and narcotics and is coordinated with the district attorney in each borough. It has facilitated more than 11,000 arrests, according to administration figures.

“New York City led the nation in reducing crime last year,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “We drove violent crime down twice as fast as the average nationwide. Crime today is almost 15% lower than it was three years ago.”