NYC Saw Massive Crime Surge as George Floyd Protests Rocked the City
As protesters call for the police budget to go way down, New York City’s murder rate is going way up.
First, the good news. Police reported a 21.2 percent decline in overall crime in May compared to the same month in 2019, WINS-AM reported. Robberies fell 29 percent and felony assaults by 18 percent.
Then the picture gets grim.
Murders were up 79 percent in May over 2019. Shootings rose 64 percent and burglaries rose 34 percent.
Since the city was convulsed with protests that followed the death of George Floyd, the bad news has grown worse.
New York City experienced 38 killings over the past four weeks, double the number form the same period last year.
Murders for the year have reached 159, an increase of 32 from the same period a year ago, according to the New York Daily News. The annual toll of shootings now stands at 394, up from 317 in the same period last year.
Car thefts have risen more than 60 percent.
“We’ve had a very interesting, to say the least, six months, between bail reform, COVID for six months and now the fallout from Minneapolis,” Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said. The fallout has included calls to defund the police and a promise from Mayor Bill de Blasio that police funding will be reduced.
“When you look at the last month or so, we are trending in a very difficult direction in terms of gun violence specifically, and that has had the impact on the homicides,” Shea added.
On Friday, the New York Post reported that there have been 28 shootings since Monday, which was also the day the NYPD disbanded a plainclothes anti-crime unit as part of police reforms.
A year ago, there were only 12 shootings for the full week. The Post noted that as of June 19, there were 97 shootings in the city, compared with 89 for all of June last year.
“The crime spike is really not a surprise for anyone that’s been following it,” Post columnist Karol Markowicz said Wednesday on the Fox News show “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
“I think we’ve let the leftist activists and politicians divide us into the camps of either you are pro-police or you believe black lives matter,” she said. “But the truth is, if you are pro-police, it’s because you believe black lives matter,” she said.
“If you look at the recent crime spike, it’s happening primarily in black neighborhoods,” Markowicz went on. “That’s why these white activists are pushing this ‘defund police’ idea, because it’s not happening in their neighborhoods. If it was, they’d want triple the police on their streets.”
In an Op-Ed for the Post, Nicole Gelinas wrote that the situation is likely to get worse.
“[T]here’s no appetite, or even a legal mechanism, for large-scale enforcement of minor crime as well as stop-and-frisk tactics to deter young men from carrying guns or knives, for fear of encountering an officer. The NYPD’s pullback of 600 undercover officers, announced Monday, points to the new calculus: The fewer interactions, the better,” she wrote.
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