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It’s Tuesday, and it’s Primary Day in our neighboring state of New Jersey.
Weather: Occasional thunderstorms with peeks of sun. High in the mid-80s.
Alternate-side parking: Suspended through Sunday. Read about the new amended regulations here.
Over the weekend, 64 people were shot in New York City. Ten of those shot, including a young father who was crossing a Bronx street with his 6-year-old daughter, died.
And, for the first time since 2016, the city surpassed 400 shootings in the first half of the year, the police said. There were 528 at the end of last month — after the worst June since 1996.
The surge of gun violence has shaken a city that was already on edge, with some people raising concerns that the crisis has been overshadowed by the pandemic and the protest movement that was ignited by the killing of George Floyd.
[Sixty-four shot, with 10 dead: Gun violence alarms a city on edge.]
“This is something that we have to double down on,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news briefing on Monday.
The details
According to my colleague Ashley Southall, The Times’s police bureau chief, shootings have been rising for the past 10 weeks, with each week more violent than the previous one. Last month, there were more than 200 shootings, compared with fewer than 90 in June 2019.
The killings have brought mourning to neighborhoods across the city, and include the young father in the Bronx and a 19-year-old who was killed at her graduation party.
“She wasn’t the intended target,” Rodney Harrison, the chief of detectives, said about the 19-year-old. “Her family is torn apart.”
The context
Murders are up across the country this year, while other violent crimes have decreased, data show.
In New York City, it has been nearly a quarter-century since gun violence in June was this high, Ms. Southall and another colleague, Neil MacFarquhar, recently wrote. Experts, however, caution against comparing crime figures in one year with the previous, and point out that homicides generally rise in the summer.
Still, after the mass protests against police brutality and racism, the uptick in shootings has become part of the national debate over the future of policing. Last month, protesters called for Mr. de Blasio to cut $1 billion from the New York Police Department.
The mayor and the City Council agreed to reach that figure, in part by canceling the scheduled hiring of 1,163 officers, but also by moving school safety officers to the authority of the Department of Education. Many activists said the changes weren’t enough.
The precedent
For years, officials have embraced the title of the “safest big city in the country.” Crime in New York has fallen drastically since 1990, when there were 2,245 killings in the city.
That downturn continued as the Police Department scaled back its divisive “stop-and-frisk” policy.
Last year, there were 300 murders in the city — up 8 percent compared with 2018, police statistics showed. That was the highest number in three years, alarming some residents.
The reaction
Some former members of the Police Department and some elected officials have begun to ask whether the department is accurately reporting shooting data. Either way, the recent shootings have created a rift between the mayor and police officials, who have sought to tie the rise in violence to criminal justice overhauls, including the reduction of the inmate population at Rikers Island.
During a radio interview on Monday, the police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, said that officers needed more resources and public support, in addition to laws that help them combat crime.
But others, including Donovan Richards, the chairman of the City Council’s public safety committee, have said that the police are conducting a work slowdown to make a point to the critics calling for cuts to the department.
“There’s a slowdown without a doubt, and N.Y.P.D. is allowing it,” Mr. Richards told Ms. Southall. “We’ve seen what the N.Y.P.D. will do when they want to keep record-low shootings over the course of the last few years.”
Chief of Department Terence A. Monahan, the top uniformed police official, has denied a slowdown.
From The Times
N.Y.C. Reopening: Dog Runs and Manicures, but Still No Indoor Dining
Amy Cooper Faces Charges After Calling Police on Black Bird Watcher
New York City’s Biggest Decision: How to Safely Reopen Schools
A Million Jobs Lost: A ‘Heart Attack’ for the N.Y.C. Economy
Want more news? Check out our full coverage.
The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.
What we’re reading
The New York State Fair was canceled for the first time in more than 70 years. [Daily News]
Long Island Rail Road passengers want officials to better enforce the wearing of face masks on trains. [Newsday]
Staten Island parents are petitioning the city to allow high school football after the governor delayed the start date for contact sports. [SILive.com]
And finally: A new take on summer camp
While the return to some aspects of pre-pandemic life continues, one mainstay of these warmer months for young people — summer camps — won’t look normal anytime soon.
All of New York State’s overnight camps will be closed for the season, and while day camps were allowed to open on June 29, many have kept their doors closed. The city’s recent budget agreement reallocated $115 million toward youth programs, but those are expected to run on a much smaller scale.
As such, many camps and other businesses are considering what the summer experience means when it is in front of a computer screen.
[This year’s summer campground: Our bedrooms and living rooms.]
The New York City-based subscription platform Baketivity, for instance, is entering the camp game for the first time. Yanky Horowitz, who runs the service, told my colleague Nellie Bowles that around 500 campers will participate in weekly baking challenges of increasing difficulty — all from their own kitchens.
Sports camps have been harder to move online, but Super Soccer Stars, which usually runs in-person programs in the city, is offering socially distanced micro-camps in the Hamptons, in addition to lessons over Zoom.
Indoor campers will just be kicking air, as opposed to soccer balls.
Decades-old camps now look different. Karen Tingley, education director of the New York City zoo summer camps, told Ms. Bowles that instead of exploring exhibits and attending in-person lessons on nature as campers have for 40 years, children will participate in a 10-week interactive television show.
“One day, we’ll go behind the scenes and meet the penguin keeper, or another day we have a live animal encounter where we’ll meet one of our animal ambassadors — a fox or a rabbit or a snake,” Ms. Tingley said. “The next day they’re doing yoga with our educational staff in our shark exhibit.”
It’s Tuesday — sit back and watch the rabbits.
Metropolitan Diary: In Tompkins Square Park
Dear Diary:
I was fresh out of college, it was my first summer in New York and I was spending a gorgeous day in Tompkins Square Park with some friends.
The park was filled with people and picnic blankets and music and laughter. An older man on a bicycle rode up next to the tree that my friends and I were sitting near. He had on a large shirt that was tucked into his shorts. It looked lumpy and odd.
I watched as he reached down the neck of the shirt and pulled out three chinchillas, one by one, and placed them onto the tree carefully.
He lay in the grass as the chinchillas played in the branches. After an hour, he tucked in his shirt, popped the animals back down and rode off.
— Charlotte Vari
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