Among the victims was a one-year-old child who died instantly.
Reduction in police budget
17 shootings would be an exceptionally high number for a weekend, but for a Monday it is exceptional. And not only is the number of shooting incidents increasing, all other forms of crime are also more common. In New York, the number of shooting incidents increased by 130 percent compared to June 2019. There were also many more burglaries and car thefts than a year earlier.
A cause is not immediately clear. What is known is that millions of New Yorkers have filed for unemployment benefits in the past year and that poverty is on the rise. A quarter of all residents have not paid rent in recent months. There are also still protests against police brutality, with the result that the police budget has shrunk and there are currently fewer police on the streets.
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Recruit training canceled
At the end of June, Mayor Bill de Blasio, in consultation with the New York Police Department (NYPD), withdrew a billion dollars from the police to spend the money “on youth and community work.” He did so while outside protesters against the police anxiously awaited his decision.
Due to the cutbacks, the training of more than 1150 candidate police officers has been canceled. The NYPD, meanwhile, is also dealing with a staff exodus and a huge number of early retirement applications. In the first week of July, 179 officers said they wanted to retire earlier, compared to 35 in the same period in 2019.
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George Floyd
The mass demonstrations against the police started after the violent death of George Floyd. When the handcuffed Floyd was arrested on May 25 in Minneapolis, an officer placed his knee on the detainee’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Floyd, 46, told the police officer several times that he could no longer breathe.
Floyd didn’t move in the last three minutes. Those minutes too, the officer kept his knee on Floyd’s neck. His death sparked Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the world calling for an end to racist and violent police brutality.
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