NYC violence surges amid protests, virus
NEW YORK >> The first disaster in a year of perpetual crises hit the New York Police Department in March, when the virus tore through the force, killing dozens and sickening entire detective squads.
Soon, the courts ground to a halt. By June, hundreds of officers were reassigned to cover mass protests against police brutality and racism, where police and protesters sometimes clashed violently. And by August, gun violence was surging, making 2020 the city’s bloodiest year in nearly a decade.
“I can’t imagine a darker period,” Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said in a year- end briefing with reporters on Tuesday, citing the confluence of the pandemic and the protests.
The year’s crime numbers give shape to 2020’s tumult: Transit cr ime and grand larceny, often the stealing of laptops or iPhones of straphangers, plummeted as trains emptied out. But burglaries and car thefts spiked in a hollowedout city. And bodegas, neighborhood staples during the throes of the pandemic, saw an increase in robberies and shootings.
By summer, the frustrations of shutdowns and economic collapse had burst onto the streets. And by the end of the year, New York City had recorded 447 homicides — the most since 2011. Shootings had doubled, and most of them were concentrated in the areas hardest hit by the coronavirus and unemployment.
The increase in violence resembles trends in many big U.S. cities, where shootings and homicides have risen even as the pandemic has driven down other crimes.
“We’ve never had a year like this in policing, when you’ve had a combination of a worldwide health epidemic and a challenge to community trust,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum. “That has been a combustible mixture. And the police in many ways were not prepared.”
Shea said Tuesday that the department was caught f lat- footed this summer when tens of thousands of protesters took to city streets after the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. The demonstrations kicked off a national debate about policing and led many departments, including New York’s, to slice budgets and redirect funding to community programs.
“There’s things that we probably should have done years and years ago,” Shea said, noting that the department had spent the months since June retraining many patrol officers and rethinking its approach to protests.
Dozens of incidents were recorded of police officers brutalizing demonstrators, many of them peaceful, during protests. The state attorney general kicked off an investigation into the department’s aggressive enforcement. And earlier this month, a city watchdog chided police officials for being unprepared and out of touch with the current discourse about police brutality.
Police officials in New York have pointed to gang disputes as a key driver of the violence over the summer, but several bystanders were caught in the cross hairs: a 43-year-old mother, killed by a stray bullet that went through her bedroom window in Queens; a man fatally shot on a handball court in Brooklyn; a 1-yearold boy, dead after a gunman opened fire on a cookout, also in Brooklyn.
But many cases were stalled because the pandemic had forced the courts to slow or shut down entirely.
“I think we’ve struggled a little bit because of COVID, and how courts were closed, but when things start opening up, we have a lot of great work in the hopper ready to go, to really close some of the violence that we saw in 2020,” said Rodney Harrison, the Police Department’s chief of detectives.
Despite the violent summer, crime numbers in the city remained well below the dark days of the 1980s and 1990s, when New York saw more than 2,000 murders a year. Homicides and shootings have plummeted in recent years, even in some of the city’s most notoriously dangerous corners.
Had 2020 not been such an anomaly, officials have said, that trend might have continued.