Professor John Pfaff shared his expert opinion with The New York Times on the rise in shootings this year and the comparison to the early days of the pandemic.
A man in Queens was fatally shot in the stomach outside a celebration thrown for his birthday. Another in the Bronx who stopped to check on a stranger’s well-being was struck in the head and torso and died. A 17-year-old was killed near his school in Brooklyn after end-of-day dismissal.The three were among 170 people shot over the last four full weeks, according to police data. The last time so many people were shot over the same four-week period in New York City was 1997.The major rise in gun violence in the city began in 2020, after a period in which violent crime dropped to its lowest levels in more than six decades. Now, even as New York City emerges from the pandemic, the spike that began as the virus spread last spring has shown no sign of receding: As of the second weekend in May, the city had recorded 505 shooting victims, the most through that point of any year in the last decade.…“Year-to-date comparisons right now are going to be quite fraught,” said John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University. “Naive comparisons of a locked-down first quarter of 2020 to a non-locked down first quarter of 2021 will almost surely make 2021 look worse.”