By Carol Tannenhauser
A 40-year-old man was shot in the left shoulder Thursday night on West 92nd Street near Columbus Avenue, and police apprehended the gunman, according to NYPD.
“Thankfully, the victim will be ok,” Deputy Inspector Naoki Yaguchi, the commander of the precinct, wrote to West Side Rag. “And thanks to the good work of the 24 Precinct officers and the help of cops from Central Park, we were able to apprehend the shooter as well as the firearm. In addition to the shooting victim, the perpetrator also pistol whipped a second victim and also shot at a third victim but missed.
“We believe this shooting is gang/crew related,” Yaguchi added. “And there is definitely an increased comfort level in carrying guns on the street.”
After several shots were fired & one person struck on Manhattan’s #UWS last night, these @NYPD24Pct cops ran toward the danger & chased down the armed gang member — taking both him & his illegal .357 off the streets before they could hurt anyone else. pic.twitter.com/qWC9kXJK06
— Edward A. Caban (@NYPDPC) July 17, 2020
It was the sixth “shooting incident” in the month of July in the 24th Precinct, which covers West 86th Street to 110th Street. There were no shootings in the 24th in the same time period in 2019, Yaguchi wrote.
Thursday’s shooting took place at 9:33 PM in the Sol Bloom Playground, which is next to 74 West 92nd Street, a New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) building. It followed a dispute in front of that location, police said. The victim was shot once in the left shoulder.
Some elected officials contend the increase in violence is related to a slowdown in enforcement by the NYPD, following the murder of George Floyd on May 25th, and subsequent nationwide protests against police brutality. “In the 24th Precinct, as of 7/12/20, (there were) 78 arrests in the 28-day period ending on 7/12/20, compared to 113 arrests in the 28-day period ending on 7/12/19. For the year, we have made 100 less arrests, 675 vs. 775,” Yaguchi said.
Police officials, including Commissioner Dermot Shea, have said that new laws intended to reduce police brutality — including a chokehold ban — are making it harder to do their jobs.
On Friday, Mayor de Blasio and Shea announced “a plan intended to combat the recent surge of shootings…But neither official offered any specifics about how their “End Gun Violence Plan” will achieve its goals,” the New York Post reported.
“All of the shooting incidents in the 24th Precinct are still under investigation as to the motives and underlying disputes between the victims and the perpetrators,” Yaguchi concluded. “Based upon locations, some incidents may be connected, but we cannot say so definitively.”
Yaguchi provided the following list of the July shooting incidents, prior to the latest:
Thursday 7/9 at 3:25 am: Shooting/homicide at W. 104 St. & Columbus Ave.
Saturday 7/11 at 2:00 pm: Shots fired (no injuries) at 136 W. 91 St.
Sunday 7/12 at 10:45 pm: Shots fired (no injuries) rear of 850 Columbus Ave.
Monday 7/13 at 11:00pm: Shots fired (no injuries) at W. 91 St. & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday 7/14 at 9:00pm: Shooting at 67 W. 109 St.
The police force feels hamstrung at the moment. They’ve been instructed to not proactively police for fear of retribution. Additionally, anti-crime units were the units making illegal gun arrests and taking these illegal guns off the streets. Those units have now been disbanded due to their disproportionate correlation to high profile shooting incidents. Criminals are humans and act with human impulses — they feel more freedom to commit crimes and act with impunity. The equation is pretty straightforward and so are the results.
DeBlasio must be removed from office. If there is some legal precedent for this I urge some top lawyers to get right on it. I know this may sound naive but the future of this city is at stake.
Yes, it sounds naive. It IS naive.
if that happens..the next mayor to finish out deblasio term will be jumanne williams..pick your poison
The Governor can remove Bill
Yawn. There are so many reports of shootings in the city these days hardly anyone even pays attention anymore.
I guess this is what happens when the mayor kneecaps the NYPD.
Before we picked sides in the police vs shooting crimes, we need evidence of cause and effect, or lack of such.
Does anyone know if these shootings would have been prevented if
1. Police had larger budget?
2. Police force was larger?
3. Police didn’t feel restrained following recent calls for restraint?
Its important to know what leads to this kind of crime, so we can take appropriate actions. I am not advocating for or against police: I just want to know what will help.
If you have any solid evidence about what can reduce shootings, please present it here. Mere opinions and guesses don’t count!
Interested to hear your thoughts.
However, to start, eliminating the plainclothes policing unit (the one that can stop crimes in process) has been disbanded, broken windows policing has been eliminated (the one that arrests low level crimes – which usually are the same ones who are involved in gun crimes), stop & frisk that got illegal guns off steer is gone, and now ~20% of police budget is going away.
All for starters.
To add, DeBlasio and City council has empowered criminals to run rough shod over our city, as if they were in a consequence free environment. No NYC liberal is ready to stand up to the mob mentality — and its about to get worse as the tax base leaves.
Pick sides? It’s bail reform from Cuomo, release of prisoners for Covid-19 concerns, and the recent policies regarding the cops coming from DeBlasio, all piggybacking on the total lack of fear of cops from criminals, which goes back to last summers wave of buckets of water dumped on the heads of cops with no consequences. DeBlasio must go. Bail reform must be undone.
and now please present your *evidence* that these are the causes of shootings.
All of you wringing your hands over 5 shootings and 1 homicide over 3 weeks REALLY need to get a grip.
Compared to the 1990s, this is nada. Things have gotten so much better. Deal with the problem, but go about your lives and have some perspective for what people in neighborhoods like East NY & Bed-Stuy are dealing with this summer.
Oh and if you’ve noticed, the cops are ‘de-policing.’ It’s why Eric Adams, a former captain, has demanded they prove that officers aren’t refusing to respond to calls for service now.
serious question: would you be so incredibly blase if the mayor was a Republican?
@UWSHebrew – you speak as if Republicans have credibility or integrity these days. Have you forgotten the past 3.5 years of complicity or do you also think that children belong in cages, Muslims are evil, Putin is a good dude, and the Constitution was meant more as a suggestion than anything else.
reply to UWSHebrew:
that is simply false. You have been using every single crime incident as a club against De Blasio for years, and never gave him one ounce of credit when crime was lower than ever in history.
and you care not a whit about police crime and deadly violence.
we don’t want to go back to the Bad Old Days (Bloomberg: racial profiling; Giuliani: wanton and arrogant disregard and even support for police killings). Nor is cash bail, which keeps poor people in jail no matter their status a fair solution. the level of gunshots will come down without resort to racially and class biased tactics.
reply to USWSHebrew:
for most years of the De blasio era, crime went down and down and was at the lowest level ever, well below the Giuliani era. And yet you and others wrote over and over again, with every crime reported, that the city was falling apart, that the criminals were in control and so on. And the attempt was in every case to try to use crime politically against De Blasio.
Now Trump is doing the same thing nationally, trying to scare people and using crime to bring in Federal forces.
It’s political, and transparently so.
“apparently you felt safe under De Blasio until just a month or so ago. Who knew?” It was bad. Now it’s really, really bad. This city has not been safe since the 2nd year of Deblasio’s first term in office.
reply to UWSHebrew:
apparently you felt safe under De Blasio until just a month or so ago. Who knew?
You don’t want to go back to the “bad old days”, but I don’t want to get shot and possibly killed. I wonder which view is more logical.
This is about the explosion of deadly violence on the UWS. Most WSR posters are choosing to ignore or make excuses for this violence because DeBlasio is the ideal progressive liberal. Your deflection is typical. Obama had children in cages, Obama killed scores of Muslim civilians in drone strikes, not a peep from the media. I can go on. If Bloomberg or anyone else was the mayor and this violence was happening, I would still be as furious as I am now. I don’t care about the political party of the person who is in charge of my safety. But so many do, which to me is bizarre.
Yes, we know it isn’t the 1990s. For the modern day though, things have not been great. You can pretty clearly see that there is gang conflict between the 105th St area and the 90th-93rd St area. If things like that are allowed to continue at the present rate, it may not be as bad as some of those areas that you mention, but for present day UWS, it would not be pretty.
The 19 year old shot in the head at 67 W 109th has died. There’s a memorial set up at the corner 109/Columbus. Completely senseless killings, sad and tragic.
With regard to reading about these crimes lately, I’ve noticed an effort to show that the shooting was amongst poor people or gang related. In this article we are told that the shootings took place in front of the projects and were possibly the result of an argument that took place there, and that it was possibly gang related. Is this designed to make us who do not live in these areas feel safer? Is this code for “don’t worry, not going to happen to you”? I can tell you that I personally do not feel any better knowing that these shootings are taking place elsewhere because I am smart enough to realize that what is going on there is in some form happening everywhere, albeit to a lesser degree. There are all sorts of things going on right now all over the UWS in fact. I hear what goes on outside my building when night settles on 65th street and broadway and i can tell you that I would not want to be out there.
I don’t think it’s intended to make anyone feel better but rather to tell the story of why something happened. Just look at the pattern of the locations of the shootings listed in this article. Also google a WSR article from years past about the FD Houses vs. Wise Towers gang issues. This is not new, but lately it has exploded to levels unseen in recent years.
no easy answers here … but thanks for the good work and getting the armed gunman off the area for now. Having grown up and lived on 93 street , including PS84 in the 1960s, things do ebb and flow. I love the city and am passionate for the area even during life in the 1970s. Fear was real, it is now in a more creepy omnipresent way that extends beyond the dangers of local guns etc. Our county really seems to be at a tipping point . Everyone, please get out and vote.
“Police officials, including Commissioner Dermot Shea, have said that new laws intended to reduce police brutality — including a chokehold ban — are making it harder to do their jobs.”
Holding officers accountable for using chokeholds — which were already banned by police protocol — makes it harder for them to do their jobs? Really? If Commissioner Shea thinks that, then he obviously doesn’t understand what the proper job of a police officer is, which makes him unqualified for his position. He should be fired.
Doesn’t anyone think economic and pandemic issues are an aggravating factor? Yes, bail changes, yes – releasing some folks from jail. Yes, changes in policing but you know, people DO have to stop getting killed. In this time of no jobs, no income for so many — frankly I’ve been worried since the beginning of the pandemic about anger flashpoints being lower and frustration leading to more violence…
I don’t want a reteurn to the 90s… this has got to be figured out.
their are kids out off school and people out of job
that i why crime is up. but lets face it the police or not hgood at their job. not that they dont try . most of them.i was amazed to discover that the nypd has a six billion dollar budget.all of that money and they are poorly trained
and racially
bias. lets spend some of that money on schools education and Job training, and their will br a lot less people on the street committing crimes with guns
I grew up in that area the cops at 24th precinct dont prevent crimes they know theres a conflict going on in the area between 86-96 area and 96-110 st area
And they see the escalation and dont do anything to stop it so they can have reason to arrest someone all of thiS CAN BE EASILY PREVENTED they are not in the dark