A shooting in New York City on Labor Day left five people injured, including a 6-year-old boy, at an annual event meant to celebrate Indian culture, as reported by CNN.
The event, known as J’Ourvet, is a festival that takes place every year on Labor Day, often followed by the West Indian Day Parade, as a display of West Indian culture. However, in recent years the event has been plagued with seemingly random acts of violence. This year’s shooting took place in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.
An anonymous law enforcement official said it was most likely that “the people shot were not the intended targets,” and thus the NYPD was investigating the shooting as a possible act of gang violence rather than a premeditated attack.
J’Ourvet has had increased security measures over the last several years, as shootings and other acts of violence have taken place at the festival before. In 2015, a similar shooting killed an aide to Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.), Carey Gabay. Among these measures are a larger presence of officers and increased security checkpoints along the whole two miles of the parade route.
Although the full J’Ourvet parade was cancelled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, there were still smaller celebratory events in the neighborhood starting in the early morning, and police still patrolled the area.
The Labor Day shooting is the latest in a massive string of shootings and violence that has spiked in New York City this year. Already the amount of homicides in New York has reached a 5-year high, and the total number of shootings in 2020 as of the beginning of August already exceed the number of shootings in the entirety of 2019. Similar trends can be seen in many of America’s biggest cities, from Chicago to Los Angeles, and can be traced to several key factors, including these cities facing some of the strictest coronavirus lockdown measures, as well as the cities’ mayors being far more permissive of rioting and acts of destruction by violent far-left groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter.