New York a battle zone
NEW YORK: The Big Apple was rocked by 45 shootings and 11 deaths over the long Fourth of July holiday weekend, up from just 16 shootings for the same period last year.
Police partially blame funding cuts and anti-police hostility since the death in custody of George Floyd in May.
New York Police Department chief Terence Monahan said “tremendous animosity” towards police officers following the recent Black Lives Matter
protests had contributed to plummeting police morale.
Total shootings soared by 130 per cent in June compared to the same period last year, NYPD statistics show.
Mr Monahan said the early release of prisoners due to the pandemic had put more violent offenders on the streets.
The police chief also denounced a new law barring police officers from keeping a suspect on the ground by pressing on his chest.
Floyd, an unarmed black man, died in Minneapolis when a white police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes as Floyd complained he couldn’t breathe.
Weeks of protests in which demonstrators called on New York mayor Bill de Blasio to “defund the city’s police” led to him cutting the NYPD’s budget by $US1 billion ($1.4bn).
The wave of shootings will further fuel tensions between the police and the Democratic leaders who are making police cuts in cities such as New York, Chicago and Seattle.
The New York Post called on the mayor to act on the crime surge after decades of gains in law and order.
“These tremendous gains are now at risk: shootings in June hit the highest monthly total since 1996, while the Fourth of July weekend brought several dozen more, plus nearly a dozen homicides,” it wrote in an editorial.
“And the mayor is throwing up his hands. On Monday, he blamed the coronavirus lockdowns for creating a ‘cabin fever’ crime wave, and cited perps walking the streets because courts are closed.”
Donald Trump has tried to make political capital out of the police reforms. In a tweet on Tuesday (AEST), he accused the Democratic mayors of New York and Chicago of protecting criminals.
New York was once one of the most violent cities in the US, but crime has been steadily decreasing since the 1990s.