A spike in shootings and murders has led NYPD brass to authorize an anti-violence blitz in 11 high-crime precincts, police sources told The Post.
Officers in anti-crime units – including narcotics cops, gang officers, and warrant enforcers, who track criminals wanted by the courts – are swarming the streets in greater-than-usual numbers on Friday and Saturday nights.
The anti-crime blitz began last weekend and is to continue at least through Dec. 31.
“They’re really concerned about the shootings and murders going up,” a police supervisor told The Post.
“They’re hoping by putting more cops out on weekends in these high-crime neighborhoods that the shootings will go down, and so will the murders.”
Overall crime is down 4.8 percent for 2006 through last Sunday, police data shows.
But in the 28 days preceding last Sunday, the number of shootings and murders skyrocketed.
Some 49 homicides were reported from Oct. 22 to Sunday, up from 35 in the same period last year – a 40 percent surge.
And 111 shootings were counted over the same four weeks, up from 89 in the same period in 2005 – an increase of 25 percent.
Battling the additional crime means overtime work for the various anti-crime units in the 46th and 48th precincts in The Bronx, the 25th, 32nd and 33rd precincts in Manhattan, and the 67th, 71st, 73rd, 75th, 77th and 79th precincts in Brooklyn, police sources said.
Already, the blitz is having an impact, the city’s data shows.
In Brooklyn’s northern precincts, the number of felonious assaults was down the week of Nov. 13 through 19, which includes the start of the overtime push.
Cops counted 49 felony assaults in the precincts that week – down 27 percent from the 67 assaults in the same period last year.
Cops were worried about the number of murders in the city even before the startling homicide hike of the last few weeks.
For the year through last Sunday, cops counted 512 murders in the five boroughs, up from 476 in the same period of 2005 – an increase of 7.5 percent.
An unusual number of those killings are reclassifications by the city medical examiner – cases in which someone hurt in a crime years ago died this year of their injuries, police said.
Some of the reclassified homicides are crimes that happened over 30 years ago – including cases where people’s lives were shortened by bullets that left them paralyzed in wheelchairs.
But even when the reclassifications are ignored, the 2006 murder count is still outpacing last year’s by about 3 percent.
CRIME TIME
Crime statistics for 2006, through last Sunday. Overall crime is down 4.8%.
Shootings 1,382 up 0.7%
Rapes 1,344 down 7.6%
Robberies 20,589 down 3.7%
Grand larcenies, auto 14,104 down 11.4%
Felony assaults 15,275 down 1.5%
Burglaries 20,045 down 4.9%
Grand larcenies 40,415 down 3.9%
Murders 512 up 7.5% from same period last year