There probably aren’t a lot of cities which would even think to celebrate such a thing, but for New York City, it is quite a rarity—the city went an entire weekend without a report of a shooting.
For the first time in at least 25 years, New York City made it from Friday to Sunday without one resident shooting another.
Chief Monahan has been around long enough to know—he’s been on the job since 1982.
Chief Monahan’s memory is not perfect, though. According the NYPD records, there was a weekend without a shooting in 1993.
The last reported shooting before the weekend happened on the morning of Oct. 11. Around 11:30 a.m., a 25-year-old man was shot in the stomach near East 98th Street and Avenue J in Brooklyn.
The streak lasted four whole days. Then, someone fired shots near West 192nd Street in Fordham Manor at 1:15 p.m. on Oct. 15, ending the peace. One of the bullets struck the ankle of a 27-year-old man.
The victim was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital. He is expected to survive.
Mayor Credits the Police Department
The respite lasted long enough for Mayor Bill de Blasio to brag about it to a class of NYPD academy cadets at their graduation ceremony Monday morning.“I have to tell you, this is a winning team for sure,” Mayor de Blasio told the graduating cadets, according to the Post.
“And to give you some evidence, about as recent as it can get, this last weekend—Friday, Saturday and Sunday—there was not a single shooting in all of New York City. Isn’t that amazing?”
It was amazing for a few more hours, before returning to bloody business as usual.
At the graduation ceremony, the Mayor gave the police credit for the shooting-free weekend.
“This is working because the NYPD has the best strategy, the best training ... because this department never rests on its laurels,” the Mayor claimed.
“This department always seeks to get better.”
A Safer City
While the shooting-less spree only lasted a few days, crime in general and violent crime specifically has been less frequent New York in the past couple of years.“Crime in New York City has reached a new low,” said Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill. “The murder rate hasn’t been lower since the Korean War.”
The number of murders in 201—290—was the lowest since 1940, and a sixth of the numbers posted in the 1980s. The murder rate—the number of murders per 100,000 residents—has been declining fairly steadily since 2000, and in 2017 was forty percent of what it was in 2001.
Robbery, burglary, and grand larceny auto all hit historic lows, as did the number of reported shootings, which at 789 shootings in one year—more than two a day—may seem like a lot, but not compared with the New York City of the past few decades.
For the first time in decades, fewer than 100,000 crimes were reported in the city in a year.
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