This is something that we have to double down on,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference on Monday, adding that the rise in shootings was fueled by several factors, but mainly the “dislocation that has happened over these last four months with the coronavirus.”
“The fact that the court system is not working, the economy is not working, people have been penned up for months and months, so many issues underlying this challenge,” he said.
But senior police officials have attributed the rise in violence to criminal justice reforms put in place over the last few years by lawmakers and prosecutors. Those changes, which include efforts by the mayor’s office to reduce the population of the Rikers Island jail complex, have put more violent criminals back on the street and erased deterrents and consequences for carrying guns and shooting them, the police have argued.
“When you take basically half the population of Rikers Island and put it onto the street and then wonder what’s going on, it’s dumbfounding to me,” the police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, said during a radio interview on 1010 WINS on Monday, alluding to the number of inmates released from the city’s jails during the pandemic.
... DeBlasio really believes that this all new violence is due to "dislocation caused by coronavirus?"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/nyregion/murders-nyc-guns-crime.htmlA young father crossing a Bronx street, holding hands with his 6-year-old daughter. A 15-year-old who refused to talk to the police in Manhattan. A man in a Staten Island public housing complex, found prone in his apartment.
They were among 64 people shot in a surge of shootings over the weekend in New York City, the police said. Ten of those shot lost their lives, including the young father and the Staten Island man — a wave of summertime violence that has given renewed urgency to a gun violence crisis that had been overshadowed this year by the coronavirus pandemic and by unrest over police racism and brutality.
The city surpassed 400 shootings in the first half of the year for the first time since 2016, with 528 by the end of last month; the 205 shootings in June were the highest for that month since 1996, the police said.
Other cities have seen similar spikes in shootings, most notably Chicago, where the current pace of homicides is poised to near the 778 recorded in 2016 — its highest total in roughly 20 years. Chicago had 336 murders as of July 2; New York, with nearly three times the population, had 181 at the end of June — compared to 147 at the same time last year but a far cry from the homicide totals that exceeded 2,000 in 1990 and 1991.
