The one-year-old, Davell Gardner, was shot in the stomach as gunmen opened fire on a gathering in a park in Brooklyn at around 11:30 p.m. on Sunday. He was taken to a local hospital, but was pronounced dead on arrival. Three other people were treated at hospitals due to gunshot wounds received during the same incident.
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Officials from the New York Police Department (NYPD) have recorded no less than 28 shooting incidents between Friday and Sunday. In this same period last year, there were only five shootings.
In fact, the number of shootings for all of 2020 has drastically increased. From January 1 to July 5, there were 585 shooting incidents in New York City. In this same period last year, there were only 381. Furthermore, the number of shooting victims in the city has gone up by 63.3 percent compared with the same time last year.
In June alone, the number of shooting incidents in the city rose by 130 percent to 205, compared with just 89 incidents during the same month in 2019. The number of reported murders in June of this year has also risen by 30 percent.
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The violence in the city continued as the week progressed. Over 100 people received gunshot wounds due to the recent spike in shooting incidents, and at least 44 more people were shot between Monday and the early morning hours of Thursday.
Listen to this episode of the Health Ranger Report, a podcast by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, as he talks about how, due to the nationwide increase in violent crime perpetrated by the Black Lives Matter movement and their police abolitionist allies, gun stores across America are running out of firearms to sell.
NYPD stretched too thin, working in a toxic environment
Many of the recent shootings in New York City remain unsolved. Due to this, and the recent spike in shooting incidents, both the leadership of the NYPD and elected New York City officials have taken to accusing each other of not doing enough to stop the violence.
Even as the number of shooting incidents has gone up, the NYPD's arrest numbers have gone down. This has led elected officials to allege that police officers are staging a work slowdown in response to increased criticism from the Black Lives Matter movement and other detractors over the supposed presence of police brutality and systemic racism in the department.
However, senior NYPD commanders fired back, saying they simply do not have enough resources to deal with a wave of shooting incidents, civil unrest brought about by a pandemic, riots and demonstrations, and “a hostile political climate that has made officers reluctant to carry out arrests because of what they see as unfair scrutiny of their conduct.”
Furthermore, NYPD Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said in an interview that the department's ability to prevent and solve crime was further diminished by the release of thousands of inmates from Rikers Island due partly to measures implemented to contain the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19), but also due to the passage of a new bail law.
Shea also said that the partial shutdown of courts in the state of New York due to the pandemic has delayed action in a lot of gun-related violence cases.
“When you put those two factors together and now you add in an anti-police sentiment and new laws that do not help the police, it is a toxic, toxic environment.”
The NYPD also said that a lot of the violence may be attributed to an escalating feud between two rival gangs.
In response to the backlog in shooting investigations, Rodney Harrison, NYPD's Chief of Detectives, has shifted 250 people from anti-crime units into detective squads. He said that the officers' knowledge of neighborhoods where they used to work at can help the Detective Bureau identify people who may be involved in shootings.
Mayor Bill de Blasio also said that he plans to increase the number of police patrols in several neighborhoods in Brooklyn where many of the recent shootings took place. He will also employ nonprofit organizations that employ former gang members to help mediate disputes that may have arisen.
“This is the way forward,” said the mayor when he announced his plans on Wednesday.
Other big cities across the United States are experiencing an increase in shooting incidents. These cities include Houston, Denver, Chicago and Atlanta. (Related: Atlanta's mayor calls for violence to stop after fatal shooting of 8-year-old girl.)
Learn more about the recent surge in shooting incidents and about the violence brought about by anti-police rioters like Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement by reading the articles at Shootings.news.
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