New York City’s police department is offering a $10,000 reward in exchange for help locating the man who shot two homeless men while they were sleeping in Manhattan on Saturday.
One of the victims, a Black man, was shot fatally and the other, a 38-year-old Hispanic man, suffered injuries to his forearm but was in stable condition at a local hospital, according to The New York Times.
Police responded to a call and arrived at the first scene around 4:30 a.m. on Saturday. Fifteen blocks away, the man fatally shot a sleeping homeless man around 6 a.m., according to police.
As gun violence has plagued New York City, new Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain, has pledged to combat the city’s growing violence and maintained New York City’s police funding in his first proposed budget.
President Biden visited the city earlier this year to show support for Adams’s plans.
“Mayor Adams, you and I agree, the answer is not to abandon our streets, that’s not the answer,” Biden said at the time.
“The answer is not to defund the police, it’s to give you the tools, the training, the funding to be partners, to be protectors,” he added.
Violent crimes have increased across the nation amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the murder rate in the U.S. rose by 30 percent between 2019 and 2020, when the pandemic took hold, the largest single year increase since at least 1905 but possibly ever.
However, recent crime rates remain nowhere near the highs seen in the 1980s and 1990s.