The NYPD thinks so:
The number of people shot surged 154 percent two weeks ago — to 56 from 22 over the same week last year — and spiked 28 percent in the last month.
Last week tallied another increase in victims — 22 people had been hit through Friday, including the three victims gunned down outside a Brooklyn school Friday.
Last year, only 17 shooting victims were logged for the entire week.
The recent gunplay has now pushed the number of shooting victims this year slightly above last year’s tragic tally — to 1,484 from 1,451 — through Oct. 16.
Four high-ranking cops point the finger at Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying their rallies pull special crime-fighting units away from the hot zones where they’re needed.
Since Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park on Sept. 17, the NYPD has relied heavily on its borough task forces, the department’s go-to teams for rowdy crowds.
But such protest duty takes the special units away from their regular jobs — patrolling public housing and problem spots and staking out nightclubs plagued by violence, supervisors said.
So..if the police are right, we have a movement of rich white kids and assorted radicals and anti-Semites squatting on other people’s land, mooching food ordinarily used to feed the homeless and now causing an increase in violence elsewhere in the city, while demanding that everyone else pay for their own poor choices to load up on student debt. While they’re belatedly learning lessons the rest of us started learning as toddlers. Obama and the Democrats were so wise to embrace the .083 Percenters.
Is this the fault of OWS? or is it as VP Biden says, because we haven’t passed the jobs bill? Have rapes gone up too? Because Sheriff Joe said if the jobs doesn’t get passed, Rapes and Murders would go up.
It’s because the cops are stretched thin baby-sitting a bunch of overgrown infants.
There simply isn’t enough gun control in Nueva York. Bloomberg needs to disarm his body guards as a show of good faith and to prove he really believes in gun control. I predict he will show himself to be a low life coward and keep the guards. He has talked the talk but will not walk the walk that he forces most New Yorker to walk.
*shrug* stop disarming the citizens and making it difficult for them to get guns. Stop criminalizing them for exercising their 2nd amendment rights and then you might start getting a handle on crime. an armed society is a polite society. *shrug* on the other hand NYC is a bastion of liberal stupidity..so it probably wouldn’t work
Why is that the fault of the protestors? It’s the police who decided to dedicate hundreds of officers to harassing and pepper-spraying peaceful citizens in public streets and parks, as well as infiltrating undercover police and agents provocateurs.
According to the police’s own complaint, they are re-directing officers away from high-crime zones to places where those officers are not involved in preventing crimes. If they were more needed at the protests than at the high-crime areas, then presumably there would be even more murders at the protests than in those areas the police had been assigned to. Since there is not, it’s obvious – again by the police’s own description – that their officers were diverted from where they were needed to where they have little or nothing to do.
If the NYPD wants to be taken seriously, they have got to admit their own corruption and dedicate themselves to ending harassment and surveillance of political activists, ending physical abuse, coercion, and censorship of citizens engaged in peaceful assembly and protected speech, educate themselves to overcome their obsession with dissent as an imaginary crime, and set their policing priorities to put violent crime first and peaceful activism last. When they can honestly grasp the truth of their own claims – that they have allowed this low-crime event to distract their resources from actual police work – they can begin to redeem themselves and do some actual good.
As it stands, their own statements reveal how far they have degraded themselves and their sworn oaths.
Please, provide some evidence of “hundreds” of police pepper spraying innocent “protesters” who apparently pose zero threat to the community and demonstrated nothing but respect for private properties. These brave revolutionaries, who are coddled by their lefty local governments who support the brunt of their terrible ideas and grant them de facto residency on public spaces.
Are reported incidents of OWS sexual assault, theft, anti semitism, and public complaints all just isolated incidents? It’s grossly unfair for us to generalize the movement based on these minor violations of good taste? We should just ignore the self appointed leaders who admitted (on camera) that they cannot and will not prevent bigots and radicals who embrace violence from joining their ranks? OK, then you can’t brand the police as the instrument of the establishment based on the actions of a few rogue cops.
99% of these losers probably can’t even make molotov cocktails. Or even effectively wield wooden sticks. If the military police approached them with intent to massacre, many of them will lick their boots to save their lives. The chasm between brave, ordinary citizen protesters who gave their lives for fundamental freedoms and faux wannabe revolutionaries with mangled class warfare sensbilities is VERY wide indeed.
At least some of the Occubaggers would indeed turn violent if the police weren’t keeping an eye on them. The OWS crowd is known to have harbored felons. There have been some instances of theft, sexual assault, and so forth. People there are selling drugs; urinating, defecating, and fornicating in public; accumulating garbage and trash everywhere; vandalizing bathrooms in local businesses; and making excessive noise on an ongoing basis. In short, they violate laws by creating public nuisances that interfere with neighboring residents and businesses.
The problem is not that patrolling the Occubaggers is a waste of police time and effort. The problem is that the police were not doing their jobs effectively. They should have arrested anybody who violated any sort of law regarding public nuisances, and they should also have ticketed the owners of Zuccotti Park. Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg sides with the Occubaggers, so the police have not been permitted to do their jobs.
Seeing as how OWS was organized by anarchists, it appears they’ve achieved their goal.
Blaming the crime spike on #OWS is, to me, like blaming a spike in tornado activity on “global warming.” Fuggedaboudit.
Ever notice how certain nics here only pop in to defend the OWS commie Nazi hippies?
…and no doubt, any day now, we’ll hear of Joe Biden proclaiming, “See! We need more money for law enforcement! We TOLD you so!!!”
Not that Joe Biden is capable of understanding this, but I want to point out that the problem has nothing to do with too little money being spent on law enforcement. The problem has to do with the law enforcers not doing their jobs properly, in this instance due to political interference.