By The Diary
Sep 14, 2024, 1:27 PM EDT
NYPD has been seeing an increase in rape reports throughout 2024, in homes and on the streets, including child, teenage and elderly victims across all five boroughs.
By the end of August, rapes in the city had increased 11%, from 978 cases at this time last year to 1,087 in 2024, police said, citing Daily News. And the cases are often higher as most rapes remain unreported. The figures include both sexual abuse committed by strangers and domestic rapes.
In July, New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said his team would address the surge and had added more detectives to the NYPD’s Special Victims Squad to do the job.
“We have greatly increased the staffing of our Special Victims Unit,” he said then. “We are bringing in new talent and we haven’t seen staffing like this in years. We are really taking this seriously.”
But sexual assaults have continued, often without arrests. For example, police are currently searching for a man who, dressed in a “Scarface” T-shirt, tried to assault a 13-year-old girl on a Manhattan street.
The girl was near the corner of E. 29th St. and Third Ave. in Kips Bay around 3:40 a.m. Aug. 28 when the suspect approached and attempted to grab and grope the girl, but she became scared, police said.
Last week, on Sept. 5, a 75-year-old woman was wrestled to the ground and nearly assaulted in a terrifying early-morning attack outside Holy Cross Cemetery in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. The attacker pulled down her pants and underwear and was about to rape her when her screams frightened him, police said.
Last month, a 19-year-old woman was sexually assaulted while walking near Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York’s mayor, a guarded, elegant and once quiet area on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Also in August, New York City corrections officer Anthony Martin Jr. was charged on suspicion of posing as a TV producer to lure a 20-year-old woman to his Queens home and molest her.
Also, a 35-year-old woman was raped by a stranger who stopped her on a street in the Bronx to ask for directions. Days earlier, a 28-year-old woman escaped being assaulted when she was near East 148th Street and Saint Ann’s Av.
In July, a 12-year-old girl was dragged down a staircase and raped on the roof of her NYCHA public housing building in East Harlem. Also that month, a man was arrested on suspicion of the attempted rape of a 21-year-old woman who was tanning in New York’s famed Central Park.
In June, a 13-year-old girl was abused while playing soccer in Kissena Park in Queens. A 25-year-old Hispanic man was detained and beaten by the community, and later confessed to the crime. In April, a woman was raped inside her apartment building in the elegant SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan (NYC) by a man who passed her on the stairs.
Outside the city, this week a woman reported being assaulted by a knife-wielding man who entered her apartment posing as a police officer in Albany, New York’s capital. And in July a man pleaded guilty to years of abusing his underage stepdaughter in Long Island, NY.
If you are a victim or suspect that someone is being abused, especially if you are a minor or an elderly person:
Seek help
- Call 911, 988 or (800)-942-6906.
- Text “WELL” to 65173.
- Check information at https://nycwell.cityofnewyork.us/es/ and www.988lineadevida.org