Gunshots on the rise in New York and affect sense of security

by

The number of shootings in New York increased in the first quarter of the year compared to the same period in 2021, while homicides declined. It is the continuation of a wave of violence that emerged at the beginning of the pandemic and has not abated following the retreat of the virus.

Incidents of gun violence rose to 296 in the first quarter from 260 in the same period last year, according to the latest Police Department statistics, which include the first three days of April.

Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said last week that the trend reflects “continued and totally unacceptable violence on our streets”.

The press conference at the New York Police Department (NYPD) headquarters marked the first time since the start of the coronavirus pandemic that city officials have come together collectively for what was once a tradition of police, journalists and public.

In the two years since the NYPD’s last press conference on crime statistics, some pockets of New York have seen a rise in gun violence and homicides, reinforcing fears of setbacks in America’s most populous city.

Mayor Eric Adams identified reversing this trend as a key goal of his administration.

“The NYPD will employ every resource and opportunity to bring security to this city,” Sewell said, but “reversing a years-long trend will not be [um objetivo] conquered in weeks”.

She attributed the drop in the murder rate to the increase in arrests. New York police reportedly arrested more than 4,000 people in March for crimes, more than double the number of arrests made in the same period in 2021.

But the commissioner’s remarks came at a time when New York was suffering a string of shootings that caught passersby in the crossfire. Kade Lewin, 12, was killed on April 1 in the Brooklyn borough when a hail of bullets hit a parked car in which he was eating with family members. Days later, a 61-year-old woman died from a stray bullet in the Bronx. And last month a 3-year-old was shot in the shoulder outside a daycare in Brooklyn.

As the city emerges exhausted from more than two years of pandemic-induced limbo, a gap has opened up between perceptions of crime and the reality of New York. By some criteria, New York today is more dangerous than the one many of its inhabitants lived in when the pandemic began. But security is still much higher than it has been in years past, and crime is lower than in many of America’s largest cities.

Firearm violence reached historically low levels in 2018 and 2019. Even with the recent increase, rates of firearm attacks, criminal assaults and serious crimes are generally similar to or below levels at the end of the 2000s and early 2010s. There were nine fewer homicides this year than in the comparable period of 2021.

In the first three months of this year, crimes such as theft, robberies and theft of high values ​​also increased, compared to the same periods in 2020 and 2021. But experts advise against short-term comparisons, especially during the pandemic, a phase that distorted the statistics. .

New York is not the only city struggling to curb crime in the wake of the pandemic. At least 473 homicides were reported in Houston last year; New York had only 15 more than that, with a population nearly four times that of Houston. And Philadelphia, located 90 minutes to the south, had 559 homicides in 2021, in a city of just 1.5 million people.

But new anxieties have led to warnings of a return to New York’s “bad old days”, during which there were many years with more than 2,000 homicides. For some, the similarity between the periods is not in crimes or figures, but in press coverage.

“It reminds me of the 1990s, in the sense that every incident of violence becomes a major news story,” said Jeffrey Butts, director of the research and evaluation center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Some of these things are just shocking. But it’s also important to remember that these things have always happened and that they were still relatively infrequent incidents. It’s just that they stay in our memory for a long time.”

Some types of crime have increased significantly since the pandemic began.

Shooting attacks are twice as frequent as in the years before the pandemic, and the highest incidence is in black and Latino neighborhoods. More than 1,800 shootings were reported annually in the past two years, with fewer than 900 in 2018. Assaults on Asian-American New Yorkers have risen sharply; Police received more than 130 hate crime reports last year, up from just one in 2019.

The subway network has also become a more dangerous space, with assaults and other serious crimes having soared during the pandemic, even taking into account that the circulation of passengers on the subway on weekdays today does not reach 60% of the previous level. And not all types of frightening incidents, such as incidents of street assault or harassment on a train, are easy to track.

Even so, Adams and Sewell made several changes to the Police Department, including bringing back plainclothes police units that were decommissioned in 2020 due to allegations of brutality and use of excessive force. The new units have been renovated and now receive training in constitutional rights and how to defuse tense situations, and officers now wear a modified uniform rather than wearing plainclothes, according to the NYPD.

You May Also Like

Recommended for you