Brooklyn, Bronx lead NYC shooting surge
Nearly half of the city’s 205 shootings played out across 10 historically crime-ridden precincts during the bloodiest June on record since 1996, NYPD stats show.
With 39 murder victims and at least 270 wounded in the gunplay, the troubling 30-day period posted a 130 percent increase in shootings from the same month in 2019. Victims as young as 11 were wounded by bullets in the city’s roughest and richest neighborhoods during all hours of the day and night — at the same time mass protests against police brutality swept through the city.
“Almost half of the shootings in June are in 10 precincts,” Chief of Crime Control Strategies Michael LiPetri said Monday, following a bloody weekend that saw 39 people shot in just 6½ hours overnight Saturday. “Those communities are being overrun by the small percentage of gang members who have no regard for their own life and absolutely zero regard for the community.”
Data reviewed by The Post show that 90 of the shootings — or 44 percent — happened across 10 precincts in Brooklyn, The Bronx and Harlem.
A cluster of six precincts in Brooklyn accounted for 50 of the June shootings.
Not one saw more gunplay than the 73rd in Brownsville, where 22 victims were wounded in 15 shootings. There have been 35 shootings in the precinct this year through July 5 — a 169 percent increase from the 13 incidents the same time last year, according to NYPD data.
The nearby 75th Precinct in East New York saw the third-most shootings in June — 12 with 16 victims. The neighboring 67th ranked seventh out of the city’s 77 precincts, followed by the 71st, 81st and 79th, respectively.
Three precincts in The Bronx — the 44th, 46th and 42nd — tallied a combined 32 shootings.
Among the 35 victims gunned down in those three precincts was Brandon Hendricks, 17, whose tragic final words were a flashpoint in the month of murder. “Yo Bam, I love you. Call my mom,” the recent high-school graduate and standout basketball star reportedly told a friend as he died on the street in Morris Heights.
Police say he was gunned down by Najhim Luke, 22, who was arrested last week on murder charges. Authorities have not revealed a motive in the killing. Hendricks’ family has said he was hit by a stray bullet.
The only precinct outside of Brooklyn and The Bronx in the bloody top 10 was the 23rd Precinct in East Harlem, where there were eight shootings and nine wounded but no murders, according to the NYPD.
The surge in violence also correlates with the disbanding of the NYPD’s anti-crime unit of plainclothes officers who focused on taking guns off the street.