The January death of a 29-year-old Brooklyn man was deemed a homicide by the medical examiner’s office yesterday, adding another statistic to a rising homicide rate so far in 2006. The victim was found dead in his bed, police said, after a night out drinking with a friend.

There have been 63 homicides in the city so far this year, according to Police Department data through Friday, representing a 20% increase from the same point last year, when there were 53.

The Police Department said the numbers are not cause for concern.

“The increase is in the context of an all-time record low for last January for all crime,” the chief spokesman for the Police Department, Paul Browne, said via e-mail. “Even so, we recorded one less homicide this January compared to January last year.”

There were 44 homicides in January, versus 45 last year.

The year’s 63 fatalities include an unusual spate of unrelated attacks last weekend.

“We experienced a spike last weekend, but spikes tend to flatten out,” Mr. Browne said. Besides, “You can’t predict a trend in an increase driven mostly by six homicides in a 24-hour period last weekend.”

It is not just the number of homicides that has jumped this year. Crime in each of the other six major categories has increased, according to data through last Sunday. Considered together, there were 12,105 major crimes in the city as of February 5, compared with 11,788 on the same day last year.

Although the year is young, the increase in crime is notable in a city where violent crime has hovered at record lows.

In December, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly touted the low crime rate in the city, based on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for the first six months of 2005.

“Once again, New York City has the distinction of being America’s safest big city,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Today’s report by the FBI shows that we are decreasing crime in nearly every category across New York City and most importantly, our decrease in violent crime outpaces the nation by nearly six times.”

The preliminary semi-annual FBI report indicates that reported murders dropped to 238 in 2005 from 278 in 2004, while violent crime overall decreased to 25,932 incidents from 26,683.

Whether crime could go even lower has been the subject of debate.

“They’re fighting their own success,” a law and police science professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Eli Silverman, said. “It’s very difficult to keep it at the level it’s at, especially as they’re more stretched,” he added.

Such a problem has plagued the Boston Police Department, Mr. Silverman said, where the number of homicides dipped to an all-time low of 31 in 1999. In 2005, the number surged to 75, representing a 10-year high, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department, Officer Michael McCarthy, said. Last year’s figure still pales in comparison with the 150 homicides in 1990.

New York City will not suffer the same fate as the Boston Police Department, Mr. Silverman said. The New York Police Department could even conceivably push the crime numbers lower, he said.

“In 2001, there were those who said the NYPD could not drive crime down any lower,” Mr. Browne said. “We then proceeded to drive it down 20% from what was then an all-time low.”