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With bullets flying and predators and punks punching in the parks, it was another weekend of Big Apple bedlam and bloodshed — with summer yet to start.
The nearly two dozen people shot over the weekend, at least two fatally, join the surge in gunfire victims that began soon after state lawmakers ditched bail requirements for all but the most violent suspects even as the city ushered in its own pro-crime legislation. Shootings have soared 70 percent over 2020; murders are up 50 percent over the same period in 2019.
“They passed a series of criminal-justice reform laws and bail reform that have proven disastrous,” fumes ex-NYPD boss Bill Bratton. “Crime . . . was at all-time lows before [they] started messing with it.”
In Washington Square Park, cops turned a blind eye as out-of-control partiers trolled them, boozed it up and blasted music well past the midnight closing time — despite neighborhood complaints. A violent loon playing “The Joker” whacked a 38-year-old man. Thugs knifed two men and pushed a woman to the ground and kicked her. Another crazy threw a Washington Square Diner cook into a glass window.
“What curfew?” snarked Izel Van Epps, 20. Park party promoter David Ortiz told The Post neighbors should move if they don’t like the lawlessness.
“The perps run this town,” a disheartened NYPD source told The Post. Yet a clueless Mayor Bill de Blasio downplayed the mayhem Monday, claiming a “natural” resolution will somehow emerge.
A growing number of New Yorkers want to take back their city now — and they’re turning to the Democratic mayoral candidate most likely to help them do that: Eric Adams.
A WNBC/Telemundo poll shows Adams leading all other candidates as the first choice of 24 percent of likely voters. That echoes his 23 percent in a Pix 11/Emerson College poll and 22 percent in NY1/Ipsos survey.
Alas, de Blasio will still keep the job through Jan. 1 — and there’s little “political will” now, sighs Bratton, to deal with the chaos, all but ensuring “a long, hot, violent summer.”
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