This ran in the New York Post over the weekend, under the headline "Shootings Are Up and Cops Blame Protests":
Bullets are flying over Broadway -- and everywhere else in the city.
The number of people shot surged 154 percent two weeks ago -- to 56 from 22 over the same week last year -- and spiked 28 percent in the last month.
Last week tallied another increase in victims -- 22 people had been hit through Friday, including the three victims gunned down outside a Brooklyn school Friday.
Last year, only 17 shooting victims were logged for the entire week.
The recent gunplay has now pushed the number of shooting victims this year slightly above last year’s tragic tally -- to 1,484 from 1,451 -- through Oct. 16.
Four high-ranking cops point the finger at Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying their rallies pull special crime-fighting units away from the hot zones where they’re needed....
Only two of those alleged sources are quoted, of course, and only one by name (though that's one more than you'd probably expect from a Murdoch hit job like this). The odd thing about all this is that if you go to the NYPD Web site and check the main crime statistics the city releases to the public every week (PDF), you see that nearly every key category reported is down for the week ending October 16 over the same week last year:
Numbers for the 28-day period ending October 16 are also down in nearly every listed category.
Here's the lone quote from a named police source:
"The city is going crazy with demonstrations and protests, and I'm lucky if I can get four cars out there," said Deputy Inspector Ted Berntsen, commander of the 13th precinct in Chelsea.
Go to the stats for his precinct (PDF) and you'll see that reported crimes in the key categories are down 30% over the same week last year, and down 10% in the past 28 days compared with the same period in 2010.
Never mind the notion that the First Amendment right to protest should be limited in America out of concern that it wastes police resources. (Gee, I guess we shouldn't have had the entire civil rights movement, either -- what an expenditure of law enforcement time that required!)
***
Elsewhere in Murdoch Land, there's this story:
The number of law enforcement officers who were killed nationwide have jumped nearly 17 percent.
Newly released statistics from the FBI show that 56 officers were murdered in the line of duty last year. That a jump from 48 in the previous year....
The South saw the greatest number of killed officers with 22 of the felonious deaths....
Let me guess: Southern criminals, anticipating the deployment of (mostly non-Southern) cops to Occupy protests nationwide, took advantage of the expected thinning of available ranks to mount their attacks. Am I close, Rupert?
(Via NewsBusters and Fox Nation, as well as Memeorandum.)
