New York City in Grip of Organized Street Crime

Crime in New York City has exploded this year. The last time the Big Apple saw more theft rotting its core, Frank Sinatra was still alive. After a surge in shootings over the previous two years, murders have somehow subsided. Instead, nearly all other forms of crime have mushroomed.

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has been arresting people at numbers not seen in decades, but with limited effect—the criminals are often quickly back on the street.

In what appears to be a new trend, street crime has become more brazen and systematic.

Grand theft, which usually refers to pickpocketing or theft of more than $1,000 in value, went up by more than 44 percent, with more than 36,000 incidents—the most since 1998.

Robberies, meanwhile, are up more than 38 percent. The NYPD has identified a new pattern where criminals appear to be more organized and systematic.

The criminals will steal a vehicle and then use it for a quick crime spree.

“They use numerous stolen cars, motorcycles, or scooters, and they change the plates during the commission of their crime,” Essig said. “All involve a large number of individuals who break into smaller groups to commit these violent robberies.”

In one such incident on Aug. 29, several young men stole a Honda Civic around 4 a.m. in the posh Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn. Less than an hour later, they pulled up on Union Turnpike in Queens and robbed a 7-Eleven convenience store at gunpoint. They hit another 7-Eleven half an hour later and two more stores an hour after that.

The police arrested several suspects, including a minor and an 18-year-old with 78 prior arrests, including seven for robberies.

By contrast, more than 40 percent of the city is white, but only about 6 percent of robbery arrestees were white. The argument thus assumes that police single out black people for arrests, and district attorneys should show leniency to robbery suspects to lower incarceration rates among blacks.

The problem with that argument is twofold.

First, nearly 65 percent of robbery suspects were identified as black, while less than 5 percent as white. That means that black suspects were more than 60 percent more likely to be identified as suspects than they were to be arrested for the offense. White people, by contrast, were slightly more likely to be arrested than they were to be marked as a robbery suspect.

Second, while there has been no dispute over helping black youth to avoid prison and stay on the right track, simply not arresting them neglects the second part of the equation—the victims.

A 2020 city law says that “no person shall restrain an individual in a manner that restricts the flow of air or blood by ... sitting, kneeling, or standing on the chest or back in a manner that compresses the diaphragm, in the course of effecting or attempting to effect an arrest.”

Such positions are virtually unavoidable in arresting a resisting subject without using a baton, taser, or a gun, according to Rener Gracie, a martial arts instructor who’s been teaching law enforcement defensive techniques from Brazilian jiu-jitsu for more than 20 years.

“Every single one of them [arrests] in which the police is successful ... included momentary, at the very least, pressure on the diaphragm of the subject,” Gracie previously told The Epoch Times.

Arrests that fail or escalate to higher levels of violence are usually those where the officers failed to pin the subject down, he said.

The law is worded so broadly as to make it illegal even when an officer ends up in one of the forbidden positions accidentally and the suspect suffers no injury.

“It’s now going to make it impossible for police officers to overpower somebody without hurting them,” said Robert Brown, former NYPD captain and now a criminal lawyer, in an earlier phone call with The Epoch Times.

Several current and former NYPD officers previously told The Epoch Times that many officers are looking for early retirement due to the increasing difficulty of doing their jobs.