NYPD: We Don’t Have the Power to Stop Shootings

A 1-year-old boy was shot to death overnight near a playground in Brooklyn, CBS 2 reported.

Police said the child was sitting in a stroller with a group of people having a barbecue when gunfire erupted.

The shooting happened around 11:30 p.m. outside Raymond Bush Playground on Madison Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Two hours earlier and nearly two miles away, another child was shot in Crown Heights.

Police said the 12-year-old boy was sitting in front of a home near Ralph Avenue and Prospect Place. He was hospitalized in stable condition.

NYPD officials are largely blaming criminal justice reforms, coronavirus mitigation measures, and “anti-police rhetoric” for an increase in shootings, and a July 4th weekend that was marred by gun violence and 11 murders across the city, Gothamist recently reported.

“There is a multitude of reasons why shootings have increased in New York City,” NYPD Chief of Crime Control Strategies Michael LiPetri told reporters at a press conference last week.

“We have the knowledge to stop shootings; it’s unfortunate that most of our powers were taken away to stop the shootings. Knowledge is power? Well, we have the knowledge, we don’t have the power.”

According to the NYPD, there were 205 shootings in June of 2020, up from 89 in 2019, a 130 percent increase. Murders have also increased in New York by 23 percent for the first six months of 2020, from 147 to 181, Gothamist recently reported.

There is also legislation that prohibits the police from using chokeholds in New York City that was passed last month by the City Council, that is awaiting Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature. The law prevents officers from “restrain[ing] an individual in a manner that restricts the flow of air or blood by compressing the windpipe or the carotid arteries on each side of the neck, or sitting, kneeling, or standing on the chest or back in a manner that compresses the diaphragm.”

Chief Monahan claimed that this law would lead to prosecutions of the police because officers frequently need to kneel on unruly arrestees, and that one of the city’s five DA’s told him privately that it was “unconstitutional.”

“There is a fear going through the police officers now from the diaphragm law—I call it the diaphragm law not the chokehold law,” Monahan said, name-checking the bill’s main sponsor, Queens Councilmember Rory Lancman.

“Rory Lancman, who is in one of the safest and affluent neighborhoods in the city, has signed a bill that is going to affect people in economically deprived areas of the city and have violence, because police officers may be hesitant to step forward and grab someone for a quality-of-life offense, if during the course of that the person resists and their knee should accidentally end up on a person’s back,” Monahan charged.

Reached by telephone on Monday, Lancman told Gothamist, “My district is nearly three quarters people of color, and if Chief Monahan wants to come and talk to my constituents about their urgent desire for police reform, I’d be happy to make that connection.”

Lancman pointed out that the NYPD’s own patrol guide contains a prohibition on any move that “may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air,” Gothamist recently reported.

“So unless Chief Monahan is confessing to the NYPD never taking its own patrol guide seriously, there is nothing for a well-trained, well-disciplined, and well-intentioned officer to fear from this bill,” Lancman said.