Low-income and minority communities in New York City are being hit hard by a recent wave of shootings sweeping across the Big Apple.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the number of shooting victims in the city has doubled in 2020. According to sources from the New York Police Department, 2020’s increase in shootings is larger than any the city has witnessed in years. The Wuhan virus pandemic has only made matters worse. From January 1 to December 20, the city’s records indicated that 1,824 people were victims of shootings, which represented a roughly 104 percent increase from 896 during the same period in 2019, per NYPD data.
The number of shootings rose to 1,493 so far in 2020 in contrast to the 754 for the same period observed in 2019. Ben Chapman noted that a “single shooting could end up with more than one victim, which accounts for the difference in totals between victims and incidents.” The Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice said that minorities accounted for the majority of the victims.
According to NYPD data, the office found that 1,440 of the 1,495 shooting victims from January 1 to October were either black or Hispanic. In other words, 96 percent of the victims were minorities. In that period, only 29 of the shooting victims were white.
The NYPD data revealed that eight low-income neighborhoods, six located in Brooklyn and two in the Bronx, were sites of the highest number of shootings of any neighborhood in the city. The Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice reported that the eight neighborhoods were the main places where the majority of shootings took place in NYC in both 1983 and 2019.
NYPD officials have blamed 2020’s rise in shootings largely on gang activity, which tends to be concentrated in less affluent neighborhoods where more shootings take place. In a recent interview, NYPD Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison said that officers should focus on arresting gang leaders in order to tackle the issue of gun violence.
It is curious how the Left continues moaning about minorities but promotes anti-policies that impact minorities the most. Such sensationalist talks about racism obscures the fact that leftist policies are dangerous for all Americans and turn otherwise illustrious cities into hellscapes. This has largely been ignored the during the height of the Black Lives Matter drama, in which any form of rational thought went out the window when discussing how crime affects these communities. Accountable forms of policing help protect all groups, especially those in crime-ridden areas.
New Yorkers should strongly reconsider voting for leftists at the municipal level if they want a high quality of life free from social ills.
