New York City shootings and violent crime enjoyed years-long declines, but are set to hit highs not seen since the mid-2000s.
NYPD Police Commissioner Dermot Shea told NY1 on Tuesday, “I wish I had better news on gun violence specifically,” but that “we’re looking to close out the year on a 14-year high.”
To give you an idea of just how big an increase that is, shootings were up 96% over 2019 in just the first 11 months of plague-wracked 2020. There were 115 shootings in just November, which NY1 says is “a 112% increase from the same time last year.”
New Yorkers also witnessed 28 murders last month, or one a day assuming killers take off Thanksgiving and Black Friday. That’s a 38% increase over last November.
The deadly crime wave isn’t due to inactivity on the part of the NYPD. Shea says his officers have made “staggering numbers of gun arrests, taking guns off the streets from felons, doing it almost always without a shot being fired.”
However, Shea said, “when you look three days later, four days later, those individuals are back on the street committing more gun violence.”
That looks like a political decision not to prosecute people for violent crimes, even when they’re repeat offenders.
New Yorkers can — and should — put the blame squarely on the shoulders of progressive New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
De Blasio pushed back, claiming that COVID is to blame:
You could not combine a massive health crisis, tens of thousands of people dying, hospitals overwhelmed, economy shut down, schools shut down, houses of worship shut down, society not having its normal moorings, all at once.
Shea however says that he doesn’t believe his city’s crime surge will go away with the pandemic. “COVID is not going to be the end all be all,” he told reporters.
Acts of rape, burglary, and car theft are also spiking this year.
New Yorkers can take solace in the fact that they aren’t being murdered in ever-increasing numbers alone.
Embarrassing: Granny-Killer Cuomo Can’t Keep His COVID Numbers Straight
Fox News reported back in August that “more than three dozen of America’s largest cities are seeing a double-digit surge in homicide rates.”
That’s 36 out of America’s 50 largest cities. Out of the top 20 for crime, all 20 are run by Democrats.
Still, none of these damning facts are enough to stop Los Angeles from doubling down on the very soft-on-crime policies that got them to where they are today.
Newly-elected Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón’s first move after being sworn in on Monday was to eliminate cash bail for most crimes. MSN reports that Gascón “said he is also implementing new policies to end the practices of charging juveniles as adults and using sentencing enhancements.”
Last night on Fox News, Tucker Carlson didn’t mince words, warning that Los Angeles will “collapse” under Gascón’s policies that are virtually “legalizing” major crimes.
A brief transcript of the best part:
Our second-largest city is on the verge of collapse tonight, we’re sad to say. They’ve legalized a whole laundry list of crimes. People will flee Los Angeles… George Gascón was sworn in as the district attorney of the city of Los Angeles on Monday of this week… If you’ve not heard that name you should know that Gascón is best known for destroying the city of San Francisco. He was the district attorney there for eight years, from 2011 to 2019. Under his tenure, San Francisco led the state of California in property crimes and violent crimes but ranked near the bottom in arrests. You might be wondering, with someone with a track record like that, how that person could move up and become DA in Los Angeles, or anywhere? And the answer, of course, is that he had powerful help. Gascón’s campaign received millions of dollars from George Soros and other left-wing donors, people who don’t live anywhere near the communities he plans to destroy.
Gascón laid down his new policies just days after the Los Angeles Times — hardly a right-wing outlet — reported that murder in the City of Angels has spiked “dramatically, leaving families shattered, communities reeling.”
The weekend before Thanksgiving, the paper noted, “fatal shootings in L.A. from Saturday into Sunday morning… pushed Los Angeles, in an already historic year, to a bloody benchmark not seen in a decade: 300 homicides.”
It’s a sad fact that the residents of our Democrat-run big cities might have to endure the return of ’70s and ’80s crime rates before they’ll even consider changing their voting habits.
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