2020 is poised to be New York City’s most violent year in nearly a decade, with shootings more than doubling last year’s figures.
After two decades of gradually reducing all seven major felony offenses in the city, killings in the city jumped 41% from 319 in 2019 to nearly 450 as of Tuesday, according to WNBC 4 — the largest single-year increase in 20 years and the most killing since 2011, when the city reported 515.
December alone has seen more than 100 shootings across the city in 2020, according to data from the New York Police Department — in 2019, there were 49. 2020’s figures pale in comparison to figures from decades past. In 1990, there were more than 2,600 murders in the Big Apple.
In September, when the city surpassed 1,000 shootings for the first time since 2015, a Brooklyn police officer said it was time for Mayor Bill de Blasio “to stop calling New York the safest big city.”
Officials cited the coronavirus pandemic as a key factor driving violent crime and protests against both police violence against black people and lockdown restrictions.
“The coronavirus has had a devastating impact on society in low-income communities, and it just adds to the social disorganization that exists,” said Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska.
“We’re definitely coming out of that dark period,” Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said Tuesday. “The confluence of COVID into the protests into all of the debate about defunding the police — I can’t imagine a darker period.”
The surge in crime, coupled with de Blasio’s plan to slash roughly $1 billion from the NYPD’s $6 billion budget, led President Trump to threaten to suspend as much as $7 billion in federal aid to New York City in a presidential order directed against a list of “anarchist jurisdictions” that “permitted violence and the destruction of property to persist and have refused to undertake reasonable measures” to restore order, according to the New York Post.
