By Gus Saltonstall
For the third time in the past two weeks, a person was robbed or attacked in Central Park.
On Monday, at around 9 p.m., a 21-year-old man was sitting on a bench inside Central Park, near West 59th Street and Center Drive, when a another man sat down next to him and forced him to input his phone password, while a different person sat on the opposite side and forcibly took $80 from the victim’s pocket, police said on Thursday.
The two robbers then ran away, police added.
NYPD did not say if the phone was used for anything once it was unlocked.
Police released a photo Thursday afternoon of the suspects.
Anyone with information in regard to this incident is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782).
Read More:
Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here, and help sustain the Rag by clicking on the purple support button below.
This will continue and accelerate, so long as the NYPD is constrained , the DA doesn’t enforce the law, and the Judges have revolving door justice. The solution is changing the political landscape from extreme socialism, to constitutional order order and clear law enforcement.
The city really needs to up security and cameras in Central Park.
Cameras aren’t going to STOP anyone. It only helps (and not always) after-the-fact. My comment wasn’t posted in an earlier crime thread, perhaps because I referenced the UES, but there were three robberies on 5th Avenue from 90th to 101st this week. There was an incident last year where two ‘kids’ on a moped robbed and knocked down a girl by the Guggenheim and then went on to rob two people in Riverside Park. It doesn’t take that long for ‘kids’ to get across the park. We need police walking around the neighborhood(s)!
I love that image of the front of the new police cars, reading “NYPD Police”.
I do hope, however, that the NYPD Police first cleared that with the Department of Redundancy Department.
As far as people being robbed in Central Park, what is there to say that hasn’t been said many, many — many — times before?
It won’t stop until people are (a) arrested, (b) prosecuted and (c) jailed for doing this to other people.
I can’t stand Trump but he is going to win. People are fed up with crime and fed up with district attorneys refusing to charge criminals with anything severe. Instead they get charged with a small misdemeanor or nothing at all.
If you talk privately to police, and once they know you’re not a member of the media, they will tell you how demoralized they are because when they arrest a suspect, even with clear eyewitness accounts, almost all of them are back on the street by the next afternoon. It’s a revolving door and the people committing crimes have no fear of any repercussions because they know they’ll be back on the street in 24 hours and can basically do whatever they want when it comes to basic robbery.
I’ve had several officers tell me that unless a victim is beaten or worse, nothing will happen to the perpetrator.