NEW YORK, NY — Gratitude poured easily from the city that never sleeps this Tuesday morning, as the NYPD prevented a lone gunman from carrying out plans to shoot eleven people on a northbound express train during rush hour in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Thanks to the quick action of nearby officers, the alleged perpetrator, who spoke of “race war” on a public YouTube channel, completely failed to leave more than ten people in the immigrant enclave with gunshot wounds and more than thirty with other injuries. In a statement, police commissioner Keechant Sewell condemned the apparent targeting of Latino residents: “Private citizens have no business openly hunting down eleven or more ethnic minorities.”
Liberal and conservative city leaders alike hailed the dozens of people not shot by the gunman as proof of mayor Eric Adams’ success in moving to an “omnipresence” policing strategy for the busiest rapid transit system in the Western hemisphere. City Council speaker Adrienne Adams boasted, “With uniformed and plainclothes officers at every subway station and over ten thousand security cameras active around the system, there’s simply no way someone could shoot more than ten or so people and then immediately disappear.”
“I just feel safer now,” explained longtime Brooklynite Tom Sark in a virtual interview from his Dutchess County residence. “We haven’t had such an aggressive pro-police approach since I first moved here, back in the de Blasio days.” The NYPD Civilian Complaint Review Board, however, acknowledged that its precautionary security sweeps had missed a couple homeless people.
– A. Burch
