Will Media Report Increase in NYC Shootings Since OWS Protests Began?
As NewsBusters previously reported, a number of Obama-loving media members were enthralled with Vice President Joe Biden's claim that failure to enact the President's jobs bill would cause a rise in murder and rape throughout the nation. Of potentially more immediate consequence, the New York Post reported Saturday that as a direct result of police forces being diverted to monitor Occupy Wall Street protests, shootings in the city have dramatically risen in the past month: 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. 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. Since Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park on Sept. 17, the NYPD has relied heavily on its borough task forces, the department’s go-to teams for rowdy crowds. But such protest duty takes the special units away from their regular jobs — patrolling public housing and problem spots and staking out nightclubs plagued by violence, supervisors said. “Normally, the task force is used in high-crime neighborhoods where you have a lot of shootings and robberies,” said one source. “They are always used when there are spikes in crime as a quick fix. But instead of being sent to Jamaica, Brownsville and the South Bronx, they are in Wall Street.” As such, there have been serious human consequences to these protests in America's most-populated city. By contrast, as the Christian Science Monitor reported in April 2010, Tea Party rallies around the country were so peaceful that police departments had to allocate far fewer resources to monitor them. Will this garner the attention of the OWS-loving press? According to LexisNexis, so far it has not. Stay tuned. (H/T Verum Serum via Hot Air )
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Will Media Report Increase in NYC Shootings Since OWS Protests Began?
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on October 24, 2011. Filed under