NYC: BUSINESSES DOWN, KILLINGS UP IN 2020

As we have been reporting, indoor dining in New York City’s restaurants is outlawed; the theater district is locked down; business occupancy rates are around 15 percent; commercial/rental real estate prices are going down; and Times Square, as evidenced by the banning of revelers to celebrate New Year’s Eve, is dead. Nearly three-and-a-half million people left New York City this year according to Unacast. Businesses are going bust; food lines are growing.
As Gerald Celente had warned back in March when politicians imposed draconian COVID War rules, “When people lose everything and have nothing left to lose, they lose it.” 
The city had a total of 447 killings in 2020, up 41 percent by the time the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve. The number of those shot throughout the City “more than doubled last year’s total,” the report said. 
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said there has been a confluence of issues that have contributed to the violent year. There have been anti-police protests in major cities across the U.S. after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody and budget constraints. He said he believes the police department is “definitely coming out of a dark period.”
Confirming what we had long forecast, Samuel Walker, a policing expert at the University of Nebraska, told the AP that the coronavirus had a devastating impact on “society in low-income communities, and it just adds to the social disorganization that exists.”
Minority residents in the City were hit hardest by the increase in shootings. The Wall Street Journal reported that data provided by the NYPD showed from January to October 1,440 of the 1,495 shooting victims (96 percent) involved either Black or Hispanic victims.
The Daily Mail reported that the City recorded its first homicide of 2021 after a person was shot and killed in a triple shooting at a Queens hotel one hour into the new year. Between midnight on New Year’s Eve and mid-morning New Year’s Day, at least seven people were shot throughout Manhattan.
TRENDPOST: New York City is not the only major city to see historic levels of violent crimes during the coronavirus outbreak. Chicago experienced its second deadliest year in two decades. 
Between January and October 2020, there was a 29 percent jump in homicides across the U.S., according to the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice. The economic impact in the low-income community will not improve anytime soon and these areas will become more desperate in the months to come.