Two New York police officers injured in Queens shooting
Two officers were shot and injured in Queens on Tuesday. Shootings like this one in Brownsville (pictured) are on the rise in the city
(Getty Images)Two police officers have been injured in a shooting in the New York City borough of Queens.
The NYPD was warning people to avoid the Springfield Gardens area. The shooting was reported at 12:50pm on Tuesday, after officers responded to a domestic violence call.
Initial reports suggest that one officer was shot in the hand and arm, and another in the leg.
The suspect is reported to have been shot and killed at the scene.
ADVISORY: Please avoid the area of 146th Road and 179th Street in Queens due to police activity. Expect a large police presence and traffic in the area. pic.twitter.com/GYh5kh5ws3
— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) November 24, 2020
The two officers were taken to Jamaica Hospital, officials said.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has had a contentious relationship with the country’s largest police force, was en route to the hospital.
His left-leaning policies have angered the rank and file, and a decision in June to cut $1 billion from the policing budget, in response to nationwide calls to “defund the police”, infuriated many officers.
Police are quitting the force in record numbers, amid anger from the community at police brutality and exhaustion from the pandemic.
More NYPD officers have applied for retirement this year than all of 2019, with more than 2,400 applying to take their pensions through the first week of October.
New York is reeling from soaring gun crime, with 32 people shot in the past week - double the number from the same week in 2019, according to police data.
The past month has seen a 130 per cent increase, year on year.
On Sunday night seven people were taken to hospital after a shooting at a teenage party in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. On Saturday afternoon in Harlem, a man was robbed for his neck chain and shot in the chest, later dying in hospital.
The last time that there was this number of shootings and murders in New York City, it was a summer in the mid-90s.
"Shootings are doubling what they were last year. That's not what we in the field would say is 'a spike in crime," said Christopher Herrmann, a former crime analyst supervisor with the New York City Police Department, in an interview with Insider last month.
"We're in uncharted waters."
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