#Shootings soar 205 percent after NYPD disbands anti-crime unit

Police at the scene where two people were shot on Fifth Avenue at E26th Street in New York, NY around 12:30 a.m. on June 26, 2020.
Christopher Sadowski

Gun violence exploded across the city after the NYPD disbanded its anti-crime unit of plainclothes cops on June 15, with three times as many shootings in the last two weeks of the month over the same period in 2019, police stats show.

And the shocking rise in gunfire — to 116 incidents from 38 between June 15 and June 2, a 205 percent increase — meant scores more victims were hurt or killed by bullets this year over last year.

Gunshot injuries skyrocketed to 157 from 47 in 2019, a 238 percent increase.

With a total of 205 shootings during the month, it was the bloodiest June in 24 years — going back to 1996, when the NYPD logged 236 incidents, the department said.

One victim, Jomo Glasgow, 35, a DJ, was gunned down outside a house party on East 49th Street in Brooklyn on June 17 — just two days after Police Commissioner Dermot Shea announced he was scrapping the unit, a group of 600 officers tasked with preventing violent street crime.

“I feel like we are giving the streets back to the criminals,” Glasgow’s mom, Hazel Thomas, told The Post.

“They shouldn’t have disbanded it,” she said of the anti-crime unit. “Whatever the problem they have, address it. But don’t disband the unit. Many lives would have been saved. Not just my son.”

The unit, once described as “elite” by mayor de Blasio, has a history of success but also controversy.

Its members have been involved in a number of high-profile police shootings and deaths, including the fatal choke hold that killed Eric Garner.

Shea described the group as a relic of the stop-and-frisk era, though he also praised plainclothes cops for “doing exactly what was asked of them.”

“They have done an exceptional job,” he said during the announcement. “But again I think it’s time to move forward and change how we police in this city.”

But some saw his decision, which came during the height of the protests against police brutality, as politically motivated.

And potentially catastrophic to crime-fighting.

“Without having this tool it will be much harder to tackle rising felony crimes, ‘shots fired’ jobs and the growing number of illegal guns pouring into the neighborhoods,” said NYPD Sgt. Joseph Imperatrice, a former anti-crime unit supervisor and founder of Blue Lives Matter.

He said members were “disheartened” by the announcement.

The NYPD has blamed the shooting spike on everything but the disbanding of the anti-crime unit.

“It’s bail reform,” Shea said on PIX11 this week.  “It’s Covid. It’s emptying out prisons. One of the most frustrating pieces right now, is a criminal justice system that just is not working and I’m calling on Albany to fix it. Fix it now. People are dying on the streets of New York City.”

De Blasio — who as recently as 2015 described the anti-crime unit as “elite” — has remained silent on it being dissolved. But when shootings started to climb last month,  he vowed that “we are not going to allow gun violence to continue to grow in this city.”

“We’re not going to go back to the days when there was so much violence pervading our communities,” Hizzoner told CBS 2 on June 22, following a week of 53 shootings. But the next week there were 63 more shootings.

The group was an outgrowth of the Street Crimes Unit, which was formed in 1971 to target high-crime zones and made 4,000 arrests that year. The Street Crimes Unit was disbanded in 2002 following the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo — and a federal probe that found it profiled people of color.

“The problem got much worse over the next 10 years,” Darius Charney, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the New York Times.