NEW YORK LETTER
Suddenly a gunfight broke out. A police officer was filmed, rushing towards an ambulance, carrying an injured little girl in his arms, while two other passers-by – a resident of New Jersey and a tourist from Rhode Island who wanted to visit the Statue of Liberty – were shot by balls. It was Saturday, May 8, before sunset in Times Square, in the heart of New York, in the district of music halls still closed, but which again attracts the barge.
The Democratic mayor of the city, Bill de Blasio, has not made the trip: he only intervenes when there are deaths in the shootings. But two candidates for his succession went to the scene on Sunday, as the campaign for the Democratic primary for mayor of New York is in full swing. Security has become a major concern as the June 22 primary approaches, which is expected to seal the November 2 election, with Democrats currently overwhelming in New York.
This is a significant reversal a year after the demonstrations of the Black Lives Matter movement in favor, in particular, of reducing the budgets allocated to the police. Crime in New York has soared with the Covid-19 crisis: the number of intentional homicides increased by almost half in 2020, from 319 in 2019 to 462 deaths in 2020 according to police. And the trend has continued since the start of the year, with an increase in homicides of more than 25%.
Soaring aggression
Of course, we are very far from the 2,262 deaths of 1990, during the war on drugs and the mafias. But the trend worries New Yorkers, who are taking the subway again and are also witnessing a surge in assaults. Crime per passenger transported increased by nearly 60% compared to 2019 and the mayor, under pressure, announced the arrival of 250 additional police officers to reinforce the 3,000 agents already assigned to monitoring the network.
The most serious incidents occur mainly in a few red-light districts of Brooklyn and the Bronx, where crime strikes minorities first (last year, 96% of shooting victims were black or Hispanic). But these incidents give the subject a global resonance.
Until the arrival of the Covid-19, the city of New York had managed to drastically reduce crime, first by organizing a brutal repression, under the mandates of Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001) then of Michael Bloomberg (2002). -2013). The current mayor, who is married to an African-American, has defended since 2014 a much more flexible policy: removal of facies checks, massive reduction of pretrial detention in the sinister island-prison of Rikers with the end of the bail system , concentration of police work in the targeted places. The policy bore fruit, especially as the economy, which had once again flourished, had provided poor neighborhoods with jobs.
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