Violent Year in New York and Across U.S. as Pandemic Fuels Crime Spike

A time without precedent saw huge increases in homicides and shootings in the city as some other types of crime plummeted.

New York City has recorded 447 homicides this year, the most since 2011. Still, crime numbers have remained well below those in the 1980s and 1990s.Credit...John Taggart for The New York Times

NY TIMES

By Ali Watkins

The first disaster in a year of perpetual crises hit the New York Police Department in March, when the virus tore through the force, killing dozens and sickening entire detective squads.

Soon, the courts ground to a halt. By June, hundreds of officers were reassigned to cover mass protests against police brutality and racism, where police and protesters sometimes clashed violently. By August, gun violence was surging. And as December drew to a close, New York’s 447 homicides made 2020 the city’s bloodiest year in nearly a decade.

The hobbled criminal justice system strained to contain the rise in violent crime caused by the pandemic’s society-wide upheaval.

“I can’t imagine a darker period,” Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said in a year-end briefing with reporters on Tuesday, citing the confluence of the pandemic and the protests.

The year’s crime numbers give shape to 2020’s tumult: Transit crime and grand larceny, often the stealing of laptops or iPhones of straphangers, plummeted as trains emptied out. But burglaries and car thefts spiked in a hollowed-out city. And bodegas, neighborhood staples during the throes of the pandemic, saw an increase in robberies and shootings.

By summer, the frustrations of shutdowns and economic collapse had burst onto the streets. Shootings had doubled, and most of them were concentrated in the areas hardest hit by the coronavirus and unemployment.

The increase in violence resembles trends in many big U.S. cities, where shootings and homicides have risen even as the pandemic has driven down other crimes.

“We’ve never had a year like this in policing, when you’ve had a combination of a worldwide health epidemic and a challenge to community trust,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum. “That has been a combustible mixture. And the police in many ways were not prepared.”

Commissioner Shea said Tuesday that the department was caught flat-footed this summer when tens of thousands of protesters took to city streets after the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. The demonstrations kicked off a national debate about policing in America and led many departments, including New York’s, to slice budgets and redirect funding to community programs.

“There’s things that we probably should have done years and years ago,” Mr. Shea said, noting that the department had spent the months since June retraining many patrol officers and rethinking its approach to protests.

Dozens of incidents were recorded of police officers brutalizing demonstrators, many of them peaceful, during protests. The state attorney general kicked off an investigation into the department’s aggressive enforcement. And earlier this month, a city watchdog chided police officials for being unprepared and out of touch with the current discourse about police brutality.

Police officials in New York have pointed to gang disputes as a key driver of the violence over the summer, but several bystanders were caught in the cross hairs: a 43-year-old mother, killed by a stray bullet that went through her bedroom window in Queens; a man fatally shot on a handball court in Brooklyn; a 1-year-old boy, dead after a gunman opened fire on a cookout, also in Brooklyn.

But many cases were stalled because the pandemic had forced the courts to operate virtually. Hardly any new trials were conducted, and the progress of many cases was significantly slowed.

“I think we’ve struggled a little bit because of Covid, and how courts were closed, but when things start opening up, we have a lot of great work in the hopper ready to go, to really close some of the violence that we saw in 2020,” said Rodney Harrison, the Police Department’s chief of detectives.

Combating street feuds has become a sort of routine for the police, particularly in the warmer months when turf battles and social media fights can lead to spikes in gun violence in certain neighborhoods. But officials and experts have said that something about the summer’s violence felt less predictable, and that made anticipating trends more difficult.

ImageGang disputes were a key driver of violence over the summer, according to police officials.Credit...Lloyd Mitchell for The New York Times


“I think it’s about something more, something out there about the anxiety, and the fact that a lot of our institutions are not functioning the way they usually do,” Mr. Wexler said of the violence. “If it was just New York, I think that would be one thing. But because the crime increase in homicides is widespread, I think it says something bigger about what’s going on.”

Despite the violent summer, crime numbers in the city remained well below the dark days of the 1980s and 1990s, when New York saw more than 2,000 murders a year. Homicides and shootings have plummeted in recent years, even in some of the city’s most notoriously dangerous corners. Had 2020 not been such an anomaly, officials have said, that trend might have continued.

This year, as crime increased, the police solved less of it. Police Department records, for example, showed that officers solved 26.3 percent of serious crimes in the second quarter of the year; department figures show that 35.8 percent of serious crimes were solved over the same period in 2019.

“I think Covid played a role earlier in the year, where we had a significant amount of people out,” Commissioner Shea said, noting that in the early days of the pandemic when many officers became sick, entire teams of detectives filled in for other squads, often in unfamiliar neighborhoods. The clearance rate improved from 26.3 percent later in the year, he said, but still fell well short of 2019’s level.

Critics of the police have questioned whether officers, chafed by the summer’s unrest and the national debate over law enforcement, began responding more slowly to calls. But some experts say much of the department’s low clearance rate is tied to difficulties caused by the pandemic — officers cannot interact as widely with the public, and most people, including criminals, are wearing masks.

“It’s convenient that everyone is wearing masks now,” said Christopher Herrmann, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “Obviously that adds to the anonymity aspect of being a criminal.” But, he added, the factors of the pandemic and the backlash against the department — budget cuts, shorter staffing and sick colleagues — had probably hurt officers’ morale.

“Cops are kind of tiptoeing around. They’re not as proactive, they’re not as aggressive,” Mr. Herrmann said. “They’re not doing their job as well as they normally do.”
Image
Nicole Spinelli and Corey Simpson, neighborhood coordination officers, in the Bronx last month. Bodegas saw an increase in robberies and shootings in 2020.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times


The number of hate crimes reported to the police also decreased sharply, with complaints down about 40 percent in 2020 after several years of steady increases. Much of the decline can be attributed to a 47 percent drop in reported anti-Semitic incidents.

But despite the decline, officials contended with a rise in incidents against Asian-Americans that they said were linked to the pandemic. The department began tracking coronavirus-related hate crimes this year, covering incidents in which a person was targeted because of bias connected to the virus.

So far, the authorities have tracked 25 virus-related crimes this year, a large number of them involving victims of Asian descent. (The department has also recorded 21 incidents as “anti-other” incidents, some of which they say may involve virus-related anti-Asian crimes.) In August, the Police Department created an anti-Asian hate crime task force to address the increase in attacks.

Michael Gold contributed reporting.

Ali Watkins is a reporter on the Metro desk, covering crime and law enforcement in New York City. Previously, she covered national security in Washington for The Times, BuzzFeed and McClatchy Newspapers. @AliWatkins

Democratic convention will showcase Biden’s front-porch campaign.

 

Fresh polling appears to validate strategy

WASHINGTON POST

New York University historian Tim Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon presidential library, said candidates left behind front-porch campaigns because the expectations of voters changed. People wanted to see and interact with presidential contenders in person, especially as they became larger-than-life figures like Theodore Roosevelt. But he noted that the public expectations have changed again in the age of covid-19, seen partly by the low turnout at Trump’s June rally in Tulsa.

“Over the last few election cycles, politicians have stopped visiting most states. And when they have visited battleground states, they have had more staged events, including in airplane hangars,” Naftali said. “When local media markets mattered, that was enough. But with the increasing nationalization of media, how important are these local markets anymore? The Biden supporter does not want him to put on a show because of implications in a pandemic. They want Biden to be responsible. There’s more of a risk for President Trump because he needs to run the table. And that means he has to energize his entire base. And they may want the entertainment of a Trump visit. Certainly, the president derives great energy and motivation from these personal appearances.”

President Trump, first lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, disembark from Marine One at the White House on Sunday. (Erin Scott/Reuters)

Biden’s decision to keep a low profile has also helped him keep the election a referendum on Trump’s performance. 

Trump, 74, takes far more questions from reporters than Biden, 77. The former vice president has not held a news conference since more than a week before he named Harris. The running mates will give their first joint interview to David Muir for a special that will air Sunday on ABC at 8 p.m.

 

While There are Over 1000 Deaths in U.S. Each Day for Past 10 Days, in NYC coronavirus infection rate drops below 1% as deaths plummet:

New York’s coronavirus infection rate fell below 1% Wednesday as the state continues to stave off a second wave of the deadly respiratory illness. Gov. Cuomo said only 636, or 0.87%, of the more than 70,000 test results that came back Tuesday were positive as hospitalizations fell by four patients to 564 people statewide.

“Our progress is thanks to the hard work of New Yorkers - even after two and a half months of reopening, the numbers have continued to go down,” the governor said in a statement.

The falling infection rate in the Empire State comes as the city passed a significant milestone: three days without a reported COVID-19 death. The state recorded just four deaths from the virus on Tuesday, Cuomo said. Another four New Yorkers of COVID-19 on Tuesday, the governor said.

Meanwhile...

At least 1,252 new coronavirus deaths and 53,633 new cases were reported in the United States on Aug. 5. Over the past week, there have been an average of 56,966 cases per day, a decrease of 14 percent from the average two weeks earlier.

As of Thursday morning, more than 4,832,300 people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 158,500 have died, according to a New York Times database.

Dr. Oxiris Barbot’s departure came after escalating tensions with City Hall.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times 

N.Y.C. Health Commissioner Resigns After Clashes With Mayor Over Virus

New York City’s health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, resigned on Tuesday and voiced her “deep disappointment” with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s handling of the pandemic, renewing scrutiny of his leadership during the crisis just as the city faces pressing decisions about how quickly to reopen schools and businesses. 

Dr. Barbot’s departure came after escalating tensions between City Hall and top city health department officials, which had begun at the start of the coronavirus outbreak in March, burst into public view and raised concerns that the feuding was undermining crucial public health policies. 

.The mayor’s new health commissioner is Dr. Dave A. Chokshi, a former senior leader at Health + Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system.

Dr. Chokshi, who has also worked for health department in Louisiana and as a health adviser to the United States secretary of Veterans Affairs, received praise from the former surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, who called him an “extraordinary public health leader who both sees the forest and the trees.”

Current and former health officials said the departure of Dr. Barbot reflected Mr. de Blasio’s history of distrust in his health department. From early in the coronavirus outbreak, he has clashed with the department on testing, public messaging and how quickly to shutter schools. Mr. de Blasio has been faulted for resisting calls to close down schools and businesses, which some epidemiologists believe worsened the outbreak.

Some public health officials had bristled at the mayor’s decision to place the city’s contact-tracing program inside Health + Hospitals. The health department has performed such tracing for decades; the public hospitals have not. Dr. Barbot disagreed with the move, but kept her disapproval private.

Perhaps the most consequential debate inside City Hall over the coronavirus came during the second week in March. The city had a small number of positive cases, but its public health system was flashing a warning about the unchecked spread of a flulike virus.

Dr. Barbot and one of her top deputies began urging more restrictions on gatherings. Mr. de Blasio for a time sided instead with Dr. Katz, who had been advising City Hall against ordering shutdowns.Some officials inside the health department talked about quitting that week, or staging a walkout to force action. Eventually, top officials and the mayor agreed on the need to lock down the city to stop the spread of the virus. Mr. de Blasio ordered schools closed on March 15.

Outside of the administration, some blamed Dr. Barbot for the delays and confusion, citing her shifting public statements on the virus from late January to early March. A few elected officials called for her to be fired in early April.

On March 4, with COVID-19 cases emerging in Westchester County, Barbot dismissed the threat of infection by casual contact, saying, “There’s no indication that being in a car, being in the subways with someone who’s potentially sick is a risk factor,” the letter notes.

At a City Hall press conference on March 5, with “only four confirmed cases” in NYC, Barbot said the city was urging people who arrived from certain countries with rising cases to self-isolate, but everybody else without symptoms should not have to quarantine.

The turmoil at the top of the city’s health agency worsened in May over the mayor’s decision to locate the city’s contact-tracing efforts within its public hospital system and not in the health department.

Under Health + Hospitals, the city’s contact-tracing program got off to a rocky start. Lacking the capability to hire and manage 3,000 new workers, it outsourced much of the day-to-day management of the call center at the core of its operations to Optum, a billion-dollar subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group.

So far, fewer than half of New Yorkers who have tested positive for the coronavirus — some 20,000 people since the program began on June 1 — have shared their contacts.

“Right now, cases are popping up all over the place and we are not linking them to known contacts except in a small proportion of cases,” Dr. Neil Vora, the director of the trace effort, said at an internal town-hall-style meeting for tracers last month, a recording of which was provided to The Times.

Even with the new tracing program, the health department has been called on to handle more intricate aspects of so-called disease detective work, particularly in group settings like homeless shelters and nursing homes. That expanded to include restaurants and other social gatherings last month.

The mayor said on Friday that outbreaks in schools would also be handled by the health department, in coordination with the city’s new corps of contact tracers.

Mr. de Blasio has pointed to court delays and bail reform to explain the surge in gun violence. But the N.Y.P.D.’s own numbers tell a different story.Brooklyn has seen some of the worst gun violence in recent weeks.Credit...Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock[/caption]

The Mayor Blames the Virus for Shootings. Here’s What Crime Data Shows.

By Alan Feuer

• In the past few weeks, Mayor Bill de Blasio and his police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, have tied the steep rise in shootings in New York City to a breakdown in the criminal justice system that they contend has allowed criminals back out on the streets.

The mayor and commissioner have cited a range of causes that they have portrayed as outside their control: the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, as well as measures approved by the State Legislature, including one that eliminated cash bail for many defendants.

But a confidential analysis of police data, conducted by city officials but not released to the public, offers little if any evidence to back up their claims. In fact, the analysis, obtained by The New York Times, suggests the state’s new bail law and the mass release of inmates from city jails in recent months because of the coronavirus outbreak played almost no role in the spike in shootings.

Of the 1,500 inmates let out of Rikers from March 16 to April 30, only seven had been rearrested on a weapons charge by mid-July, according to the confidential analysis. 

Nearly 2,000 people who in July had open gun cases were allowed to go home to await trial, but only about 40 of those defendants were arrested on another weapons charge while they were out, the analysis said.

Instead, the analysis points to a different possible reason for the wave of shootings: The number of arrests for gun crimes has plummeted.

While murders and shootings have surged, reports of other major crimes have actually fallen in recent months. Still, the spike in gun violence has stirred deep fears that the city might be sliding back to an era of random violence on the streets. Recent shooting victims have included a two teenagers going to play basketball and a baby boy.

New York City is not alone. Shootings have skyrocketed in major cities across the country, and that surge has led to intense political fights over whether efforts to rein in the police, including the Defund the Police movement touched off by the killing of George Floyd, are playing a role.

On Sunday, another 19 people were shot in New York City, one fatally. Through the first seven months of this year, shootings were up 72 percent over the same period last year and murders rose 30 percent, even as reports of other violent crimes like rape, assault and robbery fell.

In mid-May, gun arrests citywide began to drop precipitously, the city analysis of police data shows. During the week of May 24, there were 113 gun arrests. During the week of June 7, there were 71 such arrests. By the week of June 28, there were only 22.

Over the same period, the data shows, shootings started rising. During the week of May 24, there were 23 shootings; in the week of June 7, there were 40. In the week of June 28, the number of shootings spiked to 63. 

At a new conference on Tuesday, Mr. de Blasio said the city had deployed more officers to troubled precincts, and gun arrests were beginning to rise again. During the week ending on July 27, arrests for firearms climbed up back up to 54, the police said.

The city’s own analysis suggests the bail law, which allows many defendants accused of nonviolent crimes to be released before trial without posting bail, had little to do with the rise in violence. It notes that shooting incidents stayed relatively stable for more than four months after the legislation was passed.

The analysis also indicates that the courts are processing gun crimes at close to the same rate as before the pandemic. According to the Police Department’s data, there were 2,181 unresolved gun cases in July — slightly fewer than the 2,285 gun cases that were open in December 2019. 

Similarly, the courts handled 642 gun and murder arraignments from October 2019 to December 2019. Between April and June of this year, they handled 819 gun and murder arraignments — and all of them were conducted remotely by video.

“The way we are processing arrests has not changed at all,” said Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., the Manhattan district attorney. “In May, the volume and severity of the arrests we were handling was the same as it was in January. We’re open.”

Still, Michael LiPetri, the Police Department’s chief of crime control strategies, said that the virus’s effects on the criminal justice system were being felt on the streets.

Early in the pandemic, Chief LiPetri said, many suspects arrested on gun charges who in the past would have been asked to post bail were instead released without bail to stem the spread of disease in jail.

So far this year, he said, 40 percent of all gun suspects were released on their own recognizance, compared to only 25 percent last year, and about 35 percent had bail set, compared to 55 percent last year.

The large number of people being sent home to await trial, even with a serious gun charge, he said, had created a permissive atmosphere, especially among gang members who the police believe are driving the wave of shootings.

“When people get arrested and then get out, their crew members start feeling comfortable carrying firearms,” he said.

Chief LiPetri acknowledged the number of gun arrests had dropped off, saying that the force was stretched thin because of the pandemic and the need to redeploy people to cover protests.

In the past month, he said, the department has started moving robbery detectives to work on violent crime and has shifted more than 300 officers in administrative positions to precincts with high numbers of shootings.

A dispute over Postal Service funding complicates the U.S. stimulus impasse as talks continue.

Top lawmakers remained nowhere close to an agreement on Wednesday for a new economic rescue package amid the recession, and appeared to be growing increasingly pessimistic that they could meet a self-imposed Friday deadline.

A dispute over funding for the United States Postal Service has joined expanded unemployment benefits and aid to state and local governments on the list of issues dividing Democratic leaders and the Trump administration.

“I feel optimistic that there is a light at the end of the tunnel,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said after hosting another round of talks in her Capitol Hill office with Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary; Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff; and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, the minority leader. “But how long that tunnel is remains to be seen,” Ms. Pelosi added.

On the Senate floor, Mr. Schumer called for the Postal Service to fix mail delays that have resulted from cutbacks that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy put in place during the pandemic. Democrats and voting rights groups have charged that the cuts are part of a deliberate effort by President Trump to undermine the service in order to interfere with mail-in voting that will be critical to a safe election in November. Democrats have called for $3.6 billion in the aid package to ensure a secure election, including broader mail balloting, but Republicans are opposing the funds. 

Other outstanding disputes include whether to appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars to help states and local governments avoid laying off public workers as tax revenues fall, and whether to reinstate a $600 per week unemployment supplement from the federal government to laid-off workers.

Democrats are pressing to extend the payments, which lapsed last week, through January. Republicans on Tuesday countered with a plan to resume them at $400 per week through Dec. 15, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions who insisted on anonymity to describe them. Democrats declined the offer, they said. 

Mr. Trump on Wednesday again suggested that he would act on his own to impose a federal eviction moratorium and temporarily suspend payroll tax cuts if an agreement could not be reached. He also reiterated his opposition to a critical Democratic proposal to send more than $900 billion to state and local governments whose budgets have been devastated by the recession.

“We have some states and cities — you know them all — they’ve been very poorly run over the years,” he said. “We’re not going to go along with that.”

More than 53,720 cases and 1,250 deaths were reported on Wednesday in the United States. The U.S. Virgin Islands set a daily case record, and Florida became the second state after California to pass 500,000 confirmed infections.

A volunteer receiving an injection as part of a Covid-19 vaccine trial.Credit...Hans Pennink/Associated Press[/caption]

Health experts ask the F.D.A. to make vaccine deliberations public.

A letter signed by nearly 400 health experts on Wednesday night urged the Food and Drug Administration to conduct full safety and efficacy reviews of potential coronavirus vaccines before making the products widely available to the public.

The group called on Dr. Stephen Hahn, the F.D.A. commissioner, to be forthcoming about the agency’s deliberations over whether to approve any new vaccine, in order to gain the public’s trust.

“We must be able to explain to the public what we know and what we don’t know about these vaccines,” noted the letter, which was organized by the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest. “For that to happen, we must be able to witness a transparent and rigorous F.D.A. approval process that is devoid of political considerations.”

More than 30 experimental coronavirus vaccines are in clinical trials, with several companies racing to have the first product in the United States ready by the end of the year. The federal government has promised more than $9 billion to companies for these efforts to date. But many people are highly skeptical of these new vaccines, and might refuse to get them.

Kenya’s unusual approach to the school problem: Cancel the year and start over.

For Kenyan students, 2020 is turning out to be the year that disappeared.

Education officials announced in July that they were canceling the academic year and making students repeat it. They are not expected to begin classes again until January, the usual start of Kenya’s school year.

Experts believe Kenya is the only nation to have gone so far as to declare the entire school year a washout.

“It’s a sad and great loss,” said Esther Adhiambo, 18, who had expected to finish high school and enroll in university this year. “This pandemic has destroyed everything.”

The decision to scrap the academic year, taken after a monthslong debate, was made not just to protect teachers and students from the coronavirus, but also to address glaring issues of inequality that arose when school was suspended in March, said George Magoha, the education secretary. After schools closed, some students had the technology to access remote learning, but others didn’t.

But while the goal was to level the playing field, researchers say it might just widen already-existing gaps. Once schools reopen, the two sets of students will not be on the same level or able to compete equally in national exams, education experts said. 

The decision affects more than 90,000 schools and over 18 million students in pre-primary through high school, including 150,000 more in refugee camps, according to the education ministry. Universities and colleges are also closed for physical classes until January, but can continue holding virtual instruction and graduations.

Helicopter footage of partygoers gathering at the hillside home in the Beverly Crest neighborhood was broadcast on local news outlets on Monday.Credit...KTLA5[/

Los Angeles will shut off water and electricity at houses that host large parties

Eric M. Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, said on Wednesday that the city could cut off power to homes or business that host large gatherings in defiance of public health guidelines.

Large gatherings in private homes are banned under Los Angeles County’s public health orders because of the pandemic, but there have been a number of reports of parties in recent weeks. One party that drew a large group to a mansion on Mulholland Drive on Monday night devolved into chaos and gunfire after midnight, leaving five people wounded, one of whom later died, the authorities said.

“Some research has shown that 10 percent of people cause 80 percent of the spread,” Mr. Garcetti said. “These super-spreader events and super-spreader people have a disproportionate impact on the lives that we are losing, and we cannot let that happen like we saw on Mullholland Drive on Monday night.”

Teachers returned to a Georgia school district last week. 260 employees have already gone home to quarantine.

Gwinnett County’s teachers and school administrators are hardly alone in dealing with the fallout of an early outbreak as they try to launch a digital-only return.

Hundreds of students and teachers in Indiana, Mississippi, Georgia and North Carolina have already been forced into quarantine as covid-19 continues to complicate plans to reopen schools.

 

Trump and his spinners are suddenly freaking out about Florida. Here’s why.

The Trump campaign scrambles to remind seniors that vote-by-mail is good, after all.Democrats lead Republicans in mail ballot requests in the state by 600,000, leading to pressure on the president to relent in his attack on mail voting.

 

 

 

 

Shootings overnight and Sunday in NYC kill at least 9, wound 41. NYPD Blames Reforms

DAILY NEWS

New York City turned into the Wild West as a series of shootings claiming at least 9 lives and wounding 41 others — including a Bronx teenager — erupted amid Fourth of July celebrations.

The shocking wave of violence came as the city was reeling from ongoing anti-police brutality protests, weeks of lockdown orders prompted by the coronavirus outbreak and soaring summer temperatures. Adding to the chaotic atmosphere, illegal fireworks exploded throughout the five boroughs all night long.

This year’s spike in mayhem continued a worrisome surge in crime since coronavirus prompted authorities to shut down the city in mid-March.

June was especially violent, with 250 people shot in the first 28 days of the month, according to NYPD stats. That’s a massive spike compared to the 97 people shot in the same time period last year, and is the city’s most violent June on record since 1996, NYPD stats show.

So far, murders are up by 23% this year citywide, with 176 slayings as of June 28 compared to 143 during the same period last year. Even so, the city’s homicide rate remains far lower than the mid 1990s and even the mid-2000s. In 2006, the city saw 255 murders between Jan. 1 and June 28. 

Sunday’s shooters took advantage of an ongoing atmosphere of crisis, said Councilman Donovan Richards, who chairs the Council’s Public Safety Committee.

“The people exploiting this moment are sensing the division on the ground and they’re totally taking advantage of the streets, without a doubt,” the Queens Dem told The News.

“They sense division and therefore they understand they can take out their retribution on each other in ways they weren’t doing years ago because there was much more unity between the department and what was going on on the ground.”

"Most Of Our Powers Were Taken Away": NYPD Blames Reforms For Increase In Violent Crime

GOTHAMIST

NYPD officials are largely blaming criminal justice reforms, coronavirus mitigation measures, and "anti-police rhetoric" for an increase in shootings, and a July 4th weekend that was marred by gun violence and 11 murders across the city.

"There is a multitude of reasons why shootings have increased in New York City," Chief of Crime Control Strategies Michael LiPetri told reporters at a press conference on Monday afternoon. "We have the knowledge to stop shootings; it’s unfortunate that most of our powers were taken away to stop the shootings. Knowledge is power? Well, we have the knowledge, we don’t have the power."
Yet the NYPD did not elaborate on what crime-fighting powers they have lost, nor did they say if record high unemployment, lost wages, or school cancellation due to the pandemic that has killed more than 24,000 New Yorkers and sickened countless more factored into their crime analysis.
According to the NYPD, there were 205 shootings in June of 2020, up from 89 in 2019, a 130 percent increase. Murders have also increased in New York by 23 percent for the first six months of 2020, from 147 to 181.

 

At a press conference on Monday afternoon, Chief LiPetri and Chief of Department Terence Monahan specifically singled out state bail reforms, a court system "shut down" by the pandemic, people released from Rikers Island due to COVID-19, City Council legislation that would ban chokeholds, the disbanding of the NYPD's anti-crime units that accounted for a disproportionate number of police shootings, and "the people who demoralized our men in blue, in so-called protest lines" for those increases.

LiPetri said that because of the state bail reforms, 3,000 people have accounted for approximately 9,000 arrests since the pandemic began, but it's unclear if those arrests are for violent crimes or misdemeanors, or how many of those people might have been released on bail and arrested again under the old 2019 bail laws. (The "new" bail reform laws are now old: the state legislature's rollback of those reforms took effect on Friday.)

Of the 2,500 people released from Rikers due to COVID-19 concerns since the pandemic began, nine have been "tied to violent acts around the city," including two murders, though LiPetri conceded that one of those individuals would have served out their sentence before the murder was committed.
And 136 people released because of new bail reform laws this year were "involved in a shooting or a murder," the NYPD said. But did that mean they were a witness, a person of interest, a victim, or a suspect? The police department couldn't say.

Other metrics the police cited as affecting crime were even less quantifiable, like the protests that "crushed the morale of our cops," as Chief Monahan put it.
"If you walk across the street at City Hall Park over there and take a look on the street, you see the communist hammer and sickle that they painted out on the street," Monahan said. "Are these the loud voices that we should be following?"

There is also legislation that prohibits the police from using chokeholds in New York City that was passed last month by the City Council, that is awaiting Mayor Bill de Blasio's signature. The law prevents officers from "restrain[ing] an individual in a manner that restricts the flow of air or blood by compressing the windpipe or the carotid arteries on each side of the neck, or sitting, kneeling, or standing on the chest or back in a manner that compresses the diaphragm."

Chief Monahan claimed that this law would lead to prosecutions of the police because officers frequently need to kneel on unruly arrestees, and that one of the city's five DA's told him privately that it was "unconstitutional."

"There is a fear going through the police officers now from the diaphragm law—I call it the diaphragm law not the chokehold law," Monahan said, name-checking the bill's main sponsor, Queens Councilmember Rory Lancman.

"Rory Lancman, who is in one of the safest and affluent neighborhoods in the city, has signed a bill that is going to affect people in economically deprived areas of the city and have violence, because police officers may be hesitant to step forward and grab someone for a quality-of-life offense, if during the course of that the person resists and their knee should accidentally end up on a person's back," Monahan charged.

Reached by telephone on Monday, Lancman told Gothamist, "My district is nearly three quarters people of color, and if Chief Monahan wants to come and talk to my constituents about their urgent desire for police reform, I'd be happy to make that connection."

Lancman pointed out that the NYPD's own patrol guide contains a prohibition on any move that "may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air."
"So unless Chief Monahan is confessing to the NYPD never taking its own patrol guide seriously, there is nothing for a well-trained, well-disciplined, and well-intentioned officer to fear from this bill," Lancman said.

Gloria Pazmino

@GloriaPazmino

After a violent weekend, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea says this is "the storm" he said was coming. Blames bail reform and even the recent choke hold bill for "crippled police" Top Cop Points to Low Prisoner Numbers at Rikers Amid Spike in Shootings

Top Cop Points to Low Prisoner Numbers at Rikers Amid Shooting Spike

Dermot Shea says precision policing can help.

ny1.com

The council member, who sits on the council's public safety committee, is also calling for the removal of NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea for what he described as "an utter failure on the part of the police commissioner to follow the law, accept civilian authority over the police department."
Lancman said, "He's basically thrown up his hands and said all these new reforms are baloney, I can't run the police department with all of these new reforms, I give up."

A recent Vera Institute study surveyed the policing budgets of cities across the country. Cities with more police officers did not necessarily have lower rates of crime.
"Baltimore has had extremely high crime rates compared to New York, but the difference isn't the number of cops, the difference is that New York City has funded violence interruption and violence prevention programs for decades while Baltimore has done far less of that," Rahman explained.

"The investment should not be more police flooding these high crime neighborhoods, but actually more resources that help with food stability and housing stability and keeping people fundamentally safe and healthy during this crisis."