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  1. #1
    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    Stabbing Surge Stumps NYC Police, Sows Fear Among Residents

    Stabbing Surge Stumps NYC Police, Sows Fear Among Residents

    Henry Goldman
    March 18, 2016 — 4:00 AM CDT
    Updated on March 18, 2016 — 12:47 PM CDT

    New York City has seen a 20 percent increase in stabbings this year compared with last, and police say they don’t understand why it’s happening or what to do about it.

    While most of the attacks are part of domestic disputes in homes, random assaults without apparent motives are on the rise. As of March 13, police recorded 809 incidents, up from 673 last year. So far there have been 20 attacks in the subways -- nine more than last year -- including a fatal encounter Wednesday in a Harlem station.


    Surveillance footage from January, showing a 24-year-old woman attacked in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
    Source: DCPI


    Kitchen knives, screw drivers, box cutters and machetes are among the weapons used. The stabbings have overshadowed a promising trend showing a 23 percent decline in homicides and a 12 percent drop in shootings compared to last year. Tabloids reporting a stabbing almost every day in the most populous U.S. city have heightened the police department’s concern about their impact on the public.

    “The numbers are relatively very small, but stabbings are occurring all over the city,” Robert Boyce, the department’s chief of detectives, said in a telephone interview. “The random nature of some of these crimes affect everyone because it’s disturbing when it happens to just regular folks.”

    No Warning
    In January, a surveillance camera captured video of a man striding beside a 24-year-old woman on a sidewalk in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and, without warning, slicing her face twice. In another attack that month, a 71-year-old woman required 30 stitches after a man with a razor opened a four-inch gash on her left cheek as she sat on a subway train in lower Manhattan. On March 10, a man rushed up from behind and slashed a 53-year-old woman’s neck on a residential street in Brooklyn.

    Thursday, police searched for a suspect who stabbed to death a 53-year-old man in the East Harlem subway station the day before who was illegally selling MetroCard swipes for access to the trains.

    News coverage of the spate of stabbings was a factor in leading the department this year to change its record-keeping to list each attack’s circumstances and attempt to ascribe a suspect’s motive or mental state, Boyce said.

    Crime Areas
    The records reveal the attacks are most frequent in parts of the Bronx and Queens. That information isn’t very helpful because these areas show higher-than-average incidences of all crimes, Boyce said. And the unpredictability of most of the attacks make them much more difficult to police than a knife-wielding repeat offender, for whom investigators could begin to see patterns of behavior, he added.

    While the news coverage may have increased the department’s focus on the stabbings, the stories, which have sometimes appeared on the front pages, may have encouraged others to commit such acts, said David Kennedy, a criminologist who specializes in violence and gang behavior at City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

    “There’s been a lot of examples of mini-epidemics of so-called copycat behavior, where press attention makes incidents like suicides and school and spree shootings contagious,” Kennedy said. “As I watch the coverage unfold my hope is this attention isn’t causing more of them.”

    The stabbings may be symptomatic of a breakdown in civility in areas of the city where police have scaled down their enforcement of minor offenses, said Heather Mac Donald, a research fellow specializing in crime at the Manhattan Institute, a policy research organization that has been critical of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s initiatives to reduce police stop-and-frisk tactics in minority neighborhoods.

    “The same strategies aimed at getting guns off the streets, including stop-and-frisk, should apply to knives,” she said. “The public feels like the streets are getting out of control, and it’s hard to talk to anyone in the city who doesn’t feel there’s been an increase in street homelessness, litter and a general sense of order breaking down.”

    Scary Part
    Unlike guns, which must be registered and may be traced through ballistics evidence, knives can be household items and are legal to carry, with the exception of knives longer than four inches, or gravity-opened weapons such as switchblades.

    “These things are unfortunate, they occur, but the actual reality is that crime is continuing to go down in the city,” Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said during a Feb. 18 interview on WOR radio.

    Such gains have made residents throughout the city feel safer, yet the stabbings are reminiscent of the sixties, seventies and eighties -- decades when residents considered some streets dangerous at night, said Alvin Berk, chairman of the local community board in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where the 53-year-old woman was stabbed in the neck as she walked down the street while talking on her mobile phone.

    “The scariest part of this is its apparent random quality; the unpredictability of it,” Berk said. “It’s a lot easier to handle something like this when there’s an explanation for it, and you can understand it.”

    Of the hundreds of knife attacks this year, police consider less than 20 unprovoked, Boyce said. Of them, as many as five may have involved gangs, two were robberies and 11 were spats that escalated into violence.

    “Someone bumps up against another in a crowded subway, or someone gives another an unfriendly stare,” Boyce said. “Eye contact is bad on the subway. Try to avoid it and just go about your business.”

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...mong-residents
    Last edited by Newmexican; 03-19-2016 at 06:38 AM.

  2. #2
    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    Has he been charged with a hate crime?
    ‘Slasher’ hit woman with bottle while yelling ‘white b–h’: cops


    By Shawn Cohen and Danika Fears

    January 9, 2016 | 12:21am

    Kari Bazemore (left) has been charged with multiple assaults since being arrested in the slashing of a young woman earlier this week.Photo: Robert Mecea

    The career criminal accused of slashing a woman on her way to work at Whole Foods on Wednesday is also suspected of striking a 25-year-old victim on the head with a bottle while calling her a “white bitch,” police sources said.

    Kari Bazemore, 41, was charged Thursday night with a third assault, and has been linked to two more attacks since the end of September, sources said.

    According to the newest charges, he struck a 43-year-old victim in the face with a heavy shopping bag as she stood on Fifth Avenue in Midtown on Nov. 4.

    Cops have also linked him to a Sept. 29 attack on a 25-year-old salon worker and her 28-year-old friend as they were walking on East 174th Street near Walton Avenue in The Bronx, police sources said.

    They had just left a subway station with a third friend, when the 25-year-old victim noticed a man in a gray hoodie running straight at her, police sources said.

    The man then smacked the right side of her head with a bottle in a plastic bag, calling her a “white bitch.”

    Her 28-year-old friend was injured as she tussled with the bottle-wielding man, who continued screaming, “Bitch!” at her, police sources said.

    He is also expected to be charged in the slashing of Nicole Pagliaro, 28, who needed 150 stitches after she was attacked outside of her apartment building on Jan. 1, sources said.

    Less than a week later, he was arrested for slashing 24-year-old Amanda Morris’ face as she walked to her job at a Whole Foods in Chelsea.

    Bellevue Hospital doctors are evaluating Bazemore’s mental health, and he has yet to be arraigned for the Nov. 4 and Jan. 6 attacks, sources said.
    http://nypost.com/2016/01/09/slasher...hite-b-h-cops/

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