NEW YORK — New York City has seen a 20 percent increase in stabbings this year compared with last, and police say they don’t understand why it’s happening or what to do about it.
While most of the attacks are part of domestic disputes in homes, random assaults without apparent motives are on the rise. As of March 13, police recorded 809 incidents, up from 673 last year. So far there have been 20 attacks in the subways — nine more than last year — including a fatal encounter Wednesday in an East Harlem station.
Kitchen knives, screw drivers, box cutters and machetes are among the weapons used. The stabbings have overshadowed a promising crime trend showing a 30 percent decline in homicides so far this year from last and a 19 percent drop in shootings. Tabloid headlines reporting a stabbing almost every day in the most populous U.S. city have heightened the police department’s concern about their impact on the public.
“The numbers are relatively very small, but stabbings are occurring all over the city,” Robert Boyce, the department’s chief of detectives, said in a telephone interview. “The random nature of some of these crimes affect everyone because it’s disturbing when it happens to just regular folks.”
In January, a surveillance camera captured video of a man striding beside a 24-year-old woman on a sidewalk in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and, without warning, slicing her face twice. In another attack that month, a 71-year-old woman required 30 stitches after a man with a razor opened a four-inch gash on her left cheek as she sat on a subway train in lower Manhattan. On March 10, a man rushed up from behind and slashed a 53-year-old woman’s neck on a residential street in Brooklyn.
Thursday, police searched for a suspect who stabbed to death a 53-year-old man in the East Harlem subway station the day before who was illegally selling MetroCard swipes for access to the trains.
News coverage of the spate of stabbings was a factor in leading the department this year to change its record-keeping to list each attack’s circumstances and attempt to ascribe a suspect’s motive or mental state, Boyce said.
The records reveal the attacks are most frequent in parts of the Bronx and Queens. That information isn’t very helpful because these areas show higher-than-average incidences of all crimes, Boyce said. And the unpredictability of most of the attacks make them much more difficult to police than a knife-wielding repeat offender, for whom investigators could begin to see patterns of behavior, he added.
“The scariest part of this is its apparent random quality; the unpredictability of it,” said Alvin Berk, chairman of the local community board in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where the 53-year-old woman was stabbed in the neck as she walked down the street while talking on her mobile phone.
Of the hundreds of knife attacks this year, police consider less than 20 unprovoked, Boyce said. Of them, as many as five may have involved gangs, two were robberies and 11 were spats that escalated into violence.