Crime Continues to Surge, but Arrests are Up: NYPD Focused on Getting City Under Control

By Yehudit Garmaise

Crime continues to surge: now by 44%, the NYPD reported Wednesday. 

NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell described her priorities as driving down: “crime, crime, crime; violence, violence, violence,” although she added that it will not happen overnight. 

Except for murder, crime, which dropped by 15.8% compared to March 2021, has steadily risen in the first three months of 2022.

“We are deploying added resources and really trying to get these people off the streets,” Commissioner Keechant Sewell recently said.

The NYPD’s new Neighborhood Safety Unit (NSU) is one new initiative that provides 50 hours of extra training to prevent racial profiling and violence and remains laser focused on getting guns off the street.

Just in the last 24 days since the NSU hit the streets, units have made 25 arrests for the gun possession, said police who also pointed out they have dramatically increased the number of criminal arrests in New York City in the last year.

In March, police made 4,025 criminal arrests, compared to 3,140 in March 2021.

While crime in general in on the rise, sadly, the total number of hate crimes perpetrated against Jews in March 2022 rose by 92%, compared to March 2021, 

In March 2021, the NYPD reported 12 incidents of hate crimes that targeted Jews, last month, 23 anti-Semitic crimes were reported.

While at a pre-Pesach security meeting Mayor Eric Adams said thought the keys to fighting anti-Semitism were both “proper police enforcement” and “education,” City Councilman Kalman Yeger expressed gratitude to the NYPD, but he also emphasized enforcement over education. 

Citing the attack on a 21-year-old Jewish man by five teenagers last Shabbos in Williamsburg, Yeger said such crimes do not happen as a result of how educated non-Jews are in multicultural education or “how much they know or do not know about the Jews or the Holocaust.”

“What propels a group of kids walking down the street to pummel a Chaddishe person, who was minding his own business?” Councilman Yeger asked. “Nothing other than the thought that they can get away with it.”