The shocking spike in crime that plagued New York City in 2020 is continuing into 2021, according to the New York Post, with both shootings and murders up dramatically over the same period in 2020.
“Murders in the Big Apple spiked 125% in the first 10 days of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020, increasing from four to nine,” the Post reported Sunday. “And shootings continued to surge — up 24% — increasing from 25 to 31 over the same period in 2020, data show. The number of gunshot victims nearly tripled, with 36 so far this year compared to 28 during the same snapshot in 2020, a 29% increase.”
The first shooting in NYC took place almost immediately after midnight on January 1st. “Just minutes after the ball dropped in Times Square welcoming in 2021, the city had its first shooting — a 33-year-old Brooklyn woman struck by a stray bullet as she lay in her bed,” the Post reported.
Like most major cities, New York City experienced a major increase in crime in 2020, in the weeks and months following the city’s coronavirus-related lockdowns. In a story from early January, the Post noted that New York City experienced more shootings in 2020 than in the previous two years combined.
“NYPD statistics released Friday show that 1,868 people were hit by gunfire in 1,531 separate shooting incidents last year — matching the totals for both categories in 2018 plus 2019,” they noted. “Police reported a total of 1,820 victims and 1,531 shooting incidents in those two years, the stats show.”
The NYPD seems to blame an “imploding” criminal justice system that became the victim of major budget cuts in 2020, following a nationwide call to “Defund the Police” in the wake of George Floyd’s death while in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department. The NYPD saw major changes and cuts in 2020, according to local media, and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed a billion-dollar cut to the NYPD’s yearly budget.
“The approved budget includes nearly $484 million in cuts and will reallocate $354 million to other agencies ‘best positioned to carry out the duties that have been previously assigned to the New York Police Department,’ like the Department of Education, the Department of Health & Mental Hygiene and the Department of Homeless Services. Another $162 million was slashed through ‘associated costs,'” according to CNN.
One criminal justice expert suggested to the Post that progressive bail reform is also a likely factor in the crime spike.
“It’s only going to get worse,” he told the Post, referring to reform “laws enacted in 2020 mandate that suspects in a long list of crimes go free without having to post bail.” “It’s a year later and if bail reform was such a success, the architects and academics that helped design it would be shouting from the mountain tops. They aren’t.”
Democrats have been reticent to blame their campaign to defund the police for the rise in crime and, as The Daily Wire reported back in July as murders and shootings were just beginning to spike in the city, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claimed the increase in criminal behavior was the result of an increase in pandemic-driven poverty.