Violent, unprovoked attacks have New Yorkers on edge: ‘There is something profoundly wrong’

By Kerry Burke, Thomas Tracy, Tim Balk and Larry McShane

New York Daily News

•

Oct 01, 2022 at 6:17 pm

They are the buzzwords of New York City crime circa 2022: Random and unprovoked.

A chilling spate of recent incidents involving innocent victims runs the gamut from a woman savagely beaten inside a Queens subway station to a 17-year-old Brooklyn girl killed by a stray bullet to a Mexican immigrant nearly killed by a sucker-punch outside a Manhattan restaurant.

The latest terrifying attack took the life of of a veteran city EMS lieutenant on her way to grab lunch in Astoria this past Thursday, with a schizophrenic stranger knocking her to the sidewalk before stabbing her 20 times for no apparent reason.

Police on the scene at 20th Ave. and 41st St. in Queens, where the search was on for the suspect in the fatal stabbing of an FDNY EMS lieutenant on Sept. 29, 2022. (Gardiner Anderson/for New York Daily News)

“There’s something profoundly wrong with New York,” said Mary Hassler, 66, an Astoria resident and cosmetics sales person. “The number of these attacks are growing. There seems to be more and more all the time.

“It’s every New Yorker’s fear.”

Only the shooting this past Wednesday of teen victim Shayma Roman, out of the cited incidents, did not involve suspects with mental health issues, police said. The NYPD does not keep count of random or unprovoked attacks committed by the mentally ill — or anyone else.

But the department reports an uptick so far this year in 911 calls involving emotionally disturbed people. Through Sept. 29, police cited an 8% hike with the latest numbers at 131,199 — roughly 500 per day, up from 128,488 over the same stretch of 2021.

NYPD officers search for evidence as they investigate the fatal shooting of a young woman on Eastern Parkway and Rochester Ave. in Brooklyn on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022. (Jeff Bachner/for New York Daily News)

And in a year when the NYPD reported a nearly 12% drop in homicides, there was also a citywide 37% jump in robberies and a 43% increase in grand larceny as New Yorkers expressed their fears about the ongoing situation.

“You hear of these attacks daily,” said Lucia Constantine, 46, as she passed the spot where 61-year-old FDNY EMS Lt. Alison Russo was inexplicably killed on a September afternoon. “They have been more and more, and there’s no consequences. These people are out here with rap sheets as long as their arms.”

Just last week, shocking video emerged of a homeless man targeting a total stranger in the Howard Beach-JFK Airport subway stop back on Sept. 20. The suspect, with a criminal past that includes the killing of his grandmother as a 14-year-old, repeatedly punched and kicked the mother of two small kids, who was in danger of losing her sight in one eye after the relentless beating.

Ex-NYPD officer Eugene O’Donnell, now a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the arbitrary incidents resonate more with New Yorkers than other crimes or any crime statistics.

“People seem far more afraid of random attacks,” he said. “And people are not always rational about what they fear. It’s a cliche, but it’s the truth. A small number of subway passengers might be pushed on the tracks. But it’s powerful to riders who sense there’s no safety net.”

Surveillance video captures the ruthless beating of a woman inside a Queens subway station on Sept. 20, 2022.

He was astounded by the sheer volume of daily 911 calls about disturbed people, “With 500 a day, something has to end badly.”

Queens resident Kristina Escobar said she was particularly shaken because her daughter’s school was right near the site of Russo’s murder.

“NYC has launched a number of programs in recent years, many of which have seen sizable expansions in this administration, for New Yorkers living with serious mental illness,” the statement read. “Many of these interventions serve New Yorkers who are, or may become, justice-involved.”

Department spokesman Patrick Gallahue added the mentally ill “are more likely to be victims of violent crimes than perpetrators.”

The view was different from Woodside, Queens, where accountant John Santora touched on the random and horrifying nature of Russo’s slaying.

“She was just minding her own business on her way to lunch,” said the 57-year-old man. “And what about [the suspect]? Where was his family? There’s health services out there for people like him, but if the family isn’t looking out for him, things like this happen.

 

Crime is now catching up to Eric Adams’ swagger

By Harry Siegel

New York Daily News

•

May 07, 2022 at 10:00 

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It got late early for Mayor Adams’ honeymoon.

While he was in Los Angeles on a trip, paid for by his campaign, partying with Dave Chappelle and appearing on a “digital transformation” panel at the Milken Institute led by the Junk Bond King who Rudy Giuliani helped send to prison and Donald Trump eventually pardoned, the NYPD reported that the number of major crimes was up nearly 35% last month from April of 2021 and a new Quinnipiac poll showed that just 37% of New Yorkers approve of how the mayor is handling crime.

That’s a huge swing from plus 14 points with 49% approving and 35% disapproving to minus 17 points with 37% approving and 54% disapproving at a moment when 49% of New Yorkers see crime as the most urgent issue facing the city.

The crime numbers aren’t just rising compared to the pre-pandemic, George Floyd protests, and bail and other criminal justice reform numbers of 2019 — they’re up nearly 21% so far this year from the same stretch in 2010.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams attends the Berggruen Prize Gala at Berggruen Hearst Estate on May 4, 2022 in Beverly Hills, California. (David Livingston/Getty Images)

While that’s a far cry from the “bad old days” of the early 1990s, it’s no longer the “good old days” of recent vintage either but a more violent and disruptive “new normal” that New Yorkers aren’t happy about — let alone after electing a candidate who’d vowed to reduce violent crime but keeps talking as mayor about the “many rivers feeding the sea of violence.”

Adams isn’t wrong about those rivers, starting with a criminal justice system that’s made it much harder to get the 700 or so New Yorkers responsible for a vastly oversized share of violent crimes off of the streets, but he’s being judged, as he asked to be, on what happens to the sea on his watch.

One drop in that sea is known ghost-gun enthusiast and parts seller Edison Cruz, who was working at a Taco Bell in the Bronx when he allegedly got into a late-night fight with a customer there he then followed into a smoke shop around the corner and executed while also wounding two other people before ditching his gun and returning to work. He’s being held without bail now, and reportedly told detectives he was “removing a problem from society.”

If Cruz had been removed from society after earlier arrests, including one in 2020 for walking down the street wearing a bullet-proof vest with an “incendiary launcher” strapped to his back, there would have been one fewer murder victim and three fewer shooting victims.

One piece of good news amid a deluge of bad and bloody headlines is that the number of shootings this April was down nearly 30% (from 148 to 105) and the number of murders was down nearly 40% (from 50 to 31).

But those numbers are still nearly twice what they were in the prelapsarian days of 2019, and it remains to be seen over the inevitably more violent summer months ahead whether April’s progress and a dramatic increase in gun arrests this year are an early sign of the NYPD turning a corner in fighting what Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell a month ago called “continuing and completely unacceptable violence.”

She said that at the NYPD’s first full briefing on the crime numbers in two years, as the coronavirus interrupted what had been a monthly ritual in the last administration where the commissioner and other top officials reported those numbers and answered questions about them.

Now, a DCPI spokesman says, “The NYPD releases monthly press releases regarding crime statistics. We will hold crime briefings on a quarterly basis.”

So the numbers will still be there — including on a running basis, at the CompStat 2.0 website — but without the police brass accounting for them as often.

After last month’s horrific subway shooting, a New York magazine cover story about New Yorkers’ fears asked: “Does anyone really want the cops arresting somebody for smoking on the subway?”

Yes! Eighty-six percent of New Yorkers say they want more cops on the trains, and all of us understand what comes with that.

That 86% accounts for pretty much everyone outside of a small but well-amplified echo chamber that includes decarceral lawmakers and prosecutors often acting as de facto lawmakers, along with the think tanks and well-funded advocacy groups that work to get those officials elected in low-turnout primaries and the journalists feeding comments from those think tanks into their glowing stories about those politicians.

Adams, who won office by talking about fairly restoring public safety as too many Democrats have neglected the safety side of that balance, likes to say he’s here to Get Stuff Done.

If he does that, just about everything else comes out in the wash. If he does not, there’s no anti-gun-violence jacket he can wear to the Met Gala that’s going to cover it up. New Yorkers are judging Adams on whether he walks the walk, going against the current of those rivers he keeps talking about.

 

Citing Disorder, NYPD To Enforce 10 P.M. Curfew At Washington Square Park

 

GOTHAMIST

BY JAKE OFFENHARTZ

JUNE 1, 2021 12:51 P.M.

 • 109 COMMENTS

FLICKR/JEFFREYFRIEDKIN

The NYPD is enforcing a new 10 p.m. curfew at Washington Square Park, following complaints of disorder and late-night revelry at the Lower Manhattan public space.

Police officials confirmed the change this weekend, which they said was made in coordination with the NYC Parks Department. The curfew — which comes two hours earlier than the current closing time — will be implemented by a special detail of NYPD officers on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights on an "ongoing basis," police said.

The Greenwich Village park has served as an increasingly popular nighttime gathering hub, as the pandemic has forced venues to shutter and bars to curtail their hours. At the same time, some local residents of the tony neighborhood have raised concerns about an increase in music, litter, vandalism, and drug use. A template of one letter shared with the Village Sun includes complaints about the "the negative impact this has on our neighborhood safety, property values and quality of life."

As complaints have mounted in recent months, the NYPD has at times attempted to enforce the park's long-ignored midnight curfew, sending cops in riot gear to clear the square, and drawing allegations of excessive force.

Cathryn Swan, who runs the Washington Square Park Blog, said she could not remember police ever shutting the park early on an ongoing basis in the past. "There are clearly ways to figure this out without bringing in police in riot gear and curfews," Swan told Gothamist. "We're in New York City; there should be a way to instill creative solutions at a public park."

In addition to the added NYPD presence, Parks Enforcement officers will also increase their patrols of the park to address "large gatherings, amplified sound, and other condition," a spokesperson for the city agency told Gothamist.

The city parks department will also erect barriers on the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. Though drug dealers have long occupied the area, residents say the issue has worsened since the pandemic, and is contributing to rising crime. Robberies have increased 72% in the 6th precinct, which covers the park, in the last year, while assaults are up nearly 30%.

"The parks are clearly not for people to use drugs, they're not for people to do any other sorts of nefarious activities," NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said in an interview on Monday. He added that city parks were for "people sitting and enjoying themselves, for families and kids."

In an emailed statement, the Washington Square Park Conservancy, a nonprofit that helps with park programming, said they supported the closure. "After-hours usage in WSP has impinged on people's ability to safely use and enjoy the Park during the hours it is open," the statement read.