Since December, about a dozen such unprovoked stabbings have been reported across the city.
Three have occurred just this week on subway trains.
All were committed by strangers, police said, using knives, razors and possibly a machete in one case.
The recent victims include a grandmother, a man on a street in trendy East Village and a 24-year-old Whole Foods worker in Chelsea.
Police statistics show there has been a rise in knifings across the city in recent months, though the figures don’t distinguish between random and targeted attacks.
Commissioner William Bratton said this week that crime is a fact of life in New York.
"But the reality is also that there is less crime in this city than there has been at any time in the last 25 to 50 years," he added.
At least three people have been arrested already.
One man was accused of slashing a 71-year-old woman on the cheek as she rode alone on a Lower Manhattan subway car on Monday morning this week.
In another case, Anthony Christopher Smith, 30, was slashed in broad daylight on 17 January while walking down an East Village street listening to music on his headphones.
The attacker simply walked away afterwards, leaving Mr Smith in need of 150 stitches to his face.
Amanda Morris, 24, was walking to work at Whole Foods on 6 January when a man who had been walking beside her slashed her face and ran away.
Police arrested a suspect who since been accused of a similar attack on a woman in the Bronx a week earlier.
One of the earlier victims was Tony-award winning playwright David Henry Hwang.
He nearly died after a blade-wielding attacker ambushed him as he carried groceries down a Brooklyn street in November.
No comments:
Post a Comment