What to Know About N.Y.C.’s Uptick in Shootings

The details

According to my colleague Ashley Southall, The Times’s police bureau chief, shootings have been rising for the past 10 weeks, with each week more violent than the previous one. Last month, there were more than 200 shootings, compared with fewer than 90 in June 2019.

The killings have brought mourning to neighborhoods across the city, and include the young father in the Bronx and a 19-year-old who was killed at her graduation party.

“She wasn’t the intended target,” Rodney Harrison, the chief of detectives, said about the 19-year-old. “Her family is torn apart.”

The context

Murders are up across the country this year, while other violent crimes have decreased, data show.

In New York City, it has been nearly a quarter-century since gun violence in June was this high, Ms. Southall and another colleague, Neil MacFarquhar, recently wrote. Experts, however, caution against comparing crime figures in one year with the previous, and point out that homicides generally rise in the summer.

Still, after the mass protests against police brutality and racism, the uptick in shootings has become part of the national debate over the future of policing. Last month, protesters called for Mr. de Blasio to cut $1 billion from the New York Police Department.

The mayor and the City Council agreed to reach that figure, in part by canceling the scheduled hiring of 1,163 officers, but also by moving school safety officers to the authority of the Department of Education. Many activists said the changes weren’t enough.

The precedent

For years, officials have embraced the title of the “safest big city in the country.” Crime in New York has fallen drastically since 1990, when there were 2,245 killings in the city.