Unsolved 70% of last year's shootings in New York | The State
Impunity and frustration fuel violence
Photo:
Andrés Correa Guatarasma / Courtesy
Almost 70% of the shootings in New York City last year are unsolved, and more than half of the suspects arrested in the shooting have returned to the streets, alerted New York Post.
On average, the police arrested at least one suspect in only 483 of the 1,525 shootings in 2020, a rate of only 31.7%, according to data from the New York Police Department as of December 29.
The exact number of individuals caught as of December 17 was 544, an average of about 1.2 people for each shooting. But of these 544 defendants, only 254 (47%) are currently in state or municipal custody, according to NYPD.
Among the unsolved cases is the shocking stray bullet murder of a baby on July 12, caught up in a long-running dispute between rival gangs from Bedford-Stuyvesant, in front of his mother.
“It’s been tough,” Samantha Gardner, the baby’s paternal grandmother, said recently. “My son is not well. He has taken it very seriously. On holidays, instead of celebrating, he goes to the cemetery. “
It is not a unique case. Shootings in New York increased 96% in 2020 from a year earlier, and the number has been on the rise since a historic low in homicides in 2017.
NYPD top brass and unions have blamed the shocking spike in shootings on the mass release of inmates due to COVID concerns and new criminal reform laws that require judges to release some gun suspects without posting bail, since on January 1, 2020.
Critics offer different reasons: unemployment and slowdown in police workas agents see a decline in morale amid the coronavirus, anti-NYPD riots, and budget cuts.
The dissolution of the city’s crime fighting unit, which consisted of 600 civilian officers roaming the streets in an effort to seize weapons, has also been linked to the increase in shootings.
In the two months after the New York Police Department disbanded the unit and reassigned all 600 officers in mid-July, shootings increased 205%.
In this context of collective insecurity, nearly 9,000 New Yorkers applied for gun carriage in 2020, But the NYPD has approved very few, which has apparently triggered illegal trafficking.
Nearly 70 percent of 2020 shootings in NYC are unsolved due to NY City Council “defund the Police” cut backs https://t.co/6wejv7ubXJ
– Blue Lives Matter (@RetiredNYCPD) January 3, 2021
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