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July 4th Weekend Sees Fatal Shootings Across Country Amidst Rise In Crime

   DailyWire.com
Accident or crime scene cordon tape - stock photo Accident or crime scene cordon tape, police line do not cross. It is nighttime, emergency lights of police cars flashing blue, red and white in the background kali9 via Getty Images
kali9 via Getty Images

Over the July 4th weekend — a historically violent weekend, in an already historically violent year — police in several cities experienced a shocking rise in fatal shootings.

As Fox News reported, “Major cities were already braced for gun violence as shootings had been on the rise over the past few weeks, but nearly 100 people were shot across the country during the holiday weekend.”

Local New York City outlet ABC News 10 reported, “A total of 26 people were shot between midnight Friday morning and midnight Monday morning, according to NYPD data.”

As reported by CNN, “In New York, where gun violence has been rising to levels not seen in years, there were 26 victims from 21 shootings from Friday to Sunday, a decrease from the same period last year when 30 people were shot in 25 shootings, the New York Police Department said.”

“On July 4, the city experienced 12 shooting incidents that involved 13 victims, an increase from last year when there were eight shootings and eight victims, according to the NYPD,” CNN added.

This year, Fox 5 Atlanta reported that “police are investigating a murder in the middle of a fight between as many as 50 kids” on Saturday night. 

In Cincinnati, a 16-year-old and a 19-year-old were killed in a shooting on July 4th. Police believe the two young men had a pre-existing feud and likely intentionally went after one another.

According to local ABC outlet WCPO Cincinnati, “Three other teenagers — two girls and a boy, all under the age of 18 — were injured in the crossfire. All three are hospitalized. One, a 17-year-old girl, has severe injuries that could threaten her life.”

On Monday, ABC 7 Chicago reported that 85 people were shot, 14 fatally, across the city in shootings over the weekend. Law enforcement personnel were also affected, as a “Chicago police commander and a sergeant were shot and wounded early Monday while dispersing a crowd on the West Side,” per the outlet. “The commander was struck in the foot and the sergeant was grazed in the leg, according to police. Both officers were transported to Stroger Hospital. The shooter has not been located, police said.”

The weekend is one that police have noted can be violent. As reported by The Wall Street Journal last year, “Police departments in cities including Chicago and New York reported a higher number of incidents and fatalities compared with the same period last year.”

The New York Daily News reported that 2020 saw violence in the city, as well, noting that “a citywide shooting spree erupted on July 5, 2020, with a staggering 44 New Yorkers shot in 24 hours of mayhem — including nine murdered in the explosion of post-holiday violence that began shortly before 1 a.m., police said.”

This year, however, the shootings occurred with a rise in crime across the nation. 

The Gun Violence Archive tracked the weekend’s shootings over the course of 72 hours. Its available data for July 2, 2021, to July 4, 2021, showed that at least 145 people were killed during that time period while at least 354 people were injured due to gun violence. That number continued to rise into Monday as at least 20 people were killed and at least 77 people were injured. The data is updated regularly and the numbers and incidents are not necessarily final. 

As reported by The Daily Wire on Friday, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll showed that a majority of Americans do not approve of how President Joe Biden is handling the rise in crime. 

As noted by The Daily Wire, “The poll found that as opposed to 38% of Americans approving of Biden’s actions in response to soaring crime rates, a whopping 48% disapproved. The poll stated, ‘The number of Americans seeing crime as an extremely serious problem in the United States is at a more than 20-year high, Joe Biden is underwater in trust to handle it.’”

“The poll, conducted between June 27-30, stated of Americans, ’55 percent think increasing funding for police departments would reduce violent crime, 51 percent say the same about stricter enforcement of existing gun laws and 46 percent say so about stricter gun control laws,’” The Daily Wire added.

The recent rise in crime has led some members of the Left pushing back against the notion that the trend has anything to do with anti-police rhetoric that has pervaded American culture for the past several years. 

Last month, MSNBC contributor Brittany Packnett Cunningham, formerly a part of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing and the Ferguson Commission, spoke about the reason for the rise in crime and the Black Lives Matter movement. She claimed that the police are to blame for a rise of crime when specifically discussing New York City. 

“I think that there are a lot of police unions and GOP operatives that would like for us to believe that this recent crime wave has everything to do with this idea of defunding the police,” Cunningham said. 

She added that the police haven’t been defunded, discussing law enforcement spending in the 50 largest U.S. cities and saying their law enforcement general expenditures went up from 13.6% to 13.7%, as portrayed in a report from Bloomberg.

As Fox News reported, that same Bloomberg report said those cities “reduced their 2021 police budgets by 5.2% in aggregate.” Cunningham also notably didn’t focus on the fact that many of the largest cities in the United States were also at the center of Black Lives Matter protests and riots last year.

“This rise in crime is not the fault of the movement. It’s actually the fault of the police and this has been our point all along,” Cunningham said.

As The New York Times reported last month, the number of police officers retiring and leaving the force went up last year. According to the Times, “A survey of about 200 police departments indicates that retirements were up by 45 percent and resignations by 18 percent in the period between April 2020 and April 2021, when compared with the preceding 12 months.”

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