According to an annual NYPD report released yesterday on the state of murder in New York City, 36 percent of the 419 homicides in the city in 2012 took place in Brooklyn, making it the bloodiest of the five boroughs.

Most of the 419 murders took place in north and east Brooklyn. Three eastern Brooklyn neighborhoods—East New York, Brownsville and East Flatbush—are typically considered the most dangerous areas in Brooklyn.

The number of Brooklyn victims declined slightly as compared to 2011, a year in which the borough saw 38 percent of murders. Queens, which saw 20 percent of murders in 2012 experienced a slight increase, as did Manhattan, which had 15 percent in 2012.

While Staten Island saw just two percent of murders last year, distribution can be correlated to population size. Brooklyn has the most residents of any borough (2.5 million) compared to just 470,000 in Staten Island.

The NYPD also reported that 42 percent of murders in New York were motivated by a dispute or revenge, and 57 percent were the result of gun violence. Thirty-seven percent of homicides took places between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m.

Race certainly played a role in the homicide rate. The NYPD notes that 60 percent of victims were black, though black New Yorkers make up 23 percent of the population. Of all victims, nearly 40 percent were black males aged 16 to 37, and 86 percent of those black males were aged 16 to 21 and were victims of gun violence.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg presented the NYPD’s data at a press conference yesterday.  He spoke about reforming the controversial stop-and-frisk policy in New York, and remarked that teenagers in New York City are far less likely to carry handguns than teenagers in other big cities. Mr. Bloomberg called New York the safest big city in the country.

“It really is quite remarkable, the job that the NYPD and everyone else that works with them, from the public on up, is doing,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

The New York Post (who else?) reports on some girls whose splashing angered some other girls.

Then this happened:

One of the older teens got in her face and declared, “I’m going to hit you and I’m just going to walk away.’’

Sara and her friends started running, but the older girls caught up. One made a video, which was posted on YouTube.

One of bullies yelled, “Go get her!’’ Sara said.

That’s when Eva Hawley, 16, allegedly landed a right hook to her nose.

Enter obligatory community fear quote:

“There’s just too much of a criminal element here,” said Tanya Reed, 27. “It’s a beautiful pool, but I would never take my 2-year-old daughter here.”

And obligatory pissed-off old timer quote:

“People should be grateful, but they’re fighting,” said a 69-year-old Greenpoint resident, who was jumped at the same pool in her teens. “It started all over again — it’s like the 1950s. It’s a darn shame.”

Wonder which pool she was at? Again, the history of McCarren Park Pool goes along unabated. Children are awful, water is awful, old people with bad memories are awful, Batman is awful, blogging is awful, human nature is awful, everything is awful. Happy Friday.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Buying an apartment can end in a bloodbath (Polina Sergeeva, flickr)

Sure, you might bring a shrewd mindset and a few inflexible demands to an apartment closing, but a revolver?

Some people do, The New York Times reports, in a story on acts of violence, temper tantrums and shouted threats that accompany some closings in the brutal world of New York real estate.

Is it laying out all of one's savings and then some that drives people over the edge? Not really, the reporter finds. Mostly, it's the little things.

Like the beaten-down old washing machine that the sellers removed from a $3 million Greenwich Village townhouse right before the closing. The buyers were outraged, so outraged, in fact, that one of them ripped up a certified check for more than a million dollars, then took things a step further.

"'Are you going to put back the washer?' Again the seller says no. At that point, the buyer puts the two halves of the check in a glass bowl, takes out a match, and lights them on fire. Then he marches out," real estate lawyer Stephen Raphael recounted a particularly acrimonious closing to The Times.

At other closings, the violence wasn't symbolic. After learning the price her husband had received for their apartment in the East 50s, one woman flung the house keys at his head, causing a bloody wound.

“All of a sudden there was blood all over the place,” Halstead broker Fern Hammond told The Times. “Evidently foreheads bleed profusely. Everyone was pushing the papers out of the way, and the husband was holding tissues to his wound. It happened almost 30 years ago, but it is something I will never forget.”

In the case of the revolver, a lawyer told the story of a man who took the gun out of his holster and laid it on the table before asking if anyone wanted to negotiate his terms. Apparently, no one did.

kvelsey@observer.com

(Vladimir Rys/Getty Images)

Greece was torn by violence Sunday in response to parliament's passage of a new austerity bill. Over 100,000 protesters, many masked and clad in black, set fire to businesses in Athens--including movie theaters, banks and coffee shops. Looters hit well over 100 establishments. Reuters reports rioters torched 34 buildings.

The legislation that prompted the unrest slashes minimum wage by 22 percent and also cuts worker pensions.

Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos defended the cuts, which he said would stave off "uncontrollable economic chaos." Mr. Papademos also said the program's social cost would be minimal when compared to "the economic and social catastrophe that would follow" if it had not been adopted.

Violence wasn't isolated to Athens. Civil discord also spread to tourist enclaves on the island of Crete and the city of Thessaloniki.

Dramatic, raw video posted on Youtube by Russia Today (RT.com) showed Athens firefighters attempting to douse multiple blazes while other establishments burned out of control. Police with full riot gear and shields could also be seen dodging rocks and Molotov cocktails as they battled protesters with tear gas and clubs.

Video: Athens on fire as mass protest turns violent - YouTube.

[Reuters]

Zuccotti Park's not-so-spontaneous violence

How does that saying go? First they laugh at you, then they compare you to Nazis, then they tell everyone you are selling drugs and acting like criminals, then they show a dubious video where a crazy person gets beat up by an angry Turkish man for kicking his tent down, and then you win?

So take heart, Occupiers. The New York Post's ridiculous coverage of your seedy, criminal underbelly is starting to make you guys look good in comparison.

For anyone who missed it, today's  New York Post included an article called "Deranged homeless man goes on violent rampage in Zuccotti Park." The video, which isn't embeddable, is a doozy: a dreadlocked young man, practically foaming at the mouth, is kicking down tents around the parks perimeters early in the morning in a "Godzilla-like rampage." Eventually he gets a response: a Turkish man named Recai “Rocky” Iskender emerges from his tent and wrestles the man to the ground before the first guy is dragged away by volunteer EMTs.

There are several issue with the video that raises questions. Like the fact that this man --who is identified as Jeremy Clinch-- talks directly to The New York Post cameramen while kicking the tents, or that it apparently happened so early in the morning that no one else was awake to capture video from another perspective. We're not saying Mr. Clinch is a plant (he was confirmed by another OWS member to have been in the park since the beginning), but he definitely seems egged on by the cameras into provoking another Occupier to fight him. Voila: Occupy Wall Street is a super-violent place and no one can say any different.
Equally shady is how derisive the Post is of Mr. Iskender, as if being kicked awake in the morning by a mentally ill person and having a camera shoved in your face should be reason enough for a major newspaper to question your motives.

In a bizarre rant after the dust settled, Iskender told The Post that Clinch “is a police agent.”

“He is a Bloomberg agent, disturbing and disrupting the protest,” said Iskender, who after the fight donned a message board that read, “USA-Turk Army Ended My Diplomatic Career 6 Times,” and also charged that “AC Tropicana Casino Robbed My $30K Pay For My Driving Job.”

A "peaceful" protest?

With the weather getting colder and news outlets packing up and moving on to different stories, it's now up to Occupy Wall Street's own media team to start sending out videos of their violent arrests. But can we trust what we're seeing?

As we mentioned earlier, last night saw at least 10 protesters arrested in their march towards Union Square, where they were met by police in riot gear and orange netting. This video was sent around this morning by Vlad Teichberg, a member of General Assembly/OWS' media team, with the subject line "Graphic Footage of NYPD police attacking #occupywallst protestors solidarity march."

We've discussed OWS's image problem before, but the release of this video just about sums is up. In it, the protesters don't seem peaceful at all: after one of their members is forced to the ground and arrested (around the 4:10 mark) you can see a young man in a hoodie screaming directly into a police officer's face, "Who do you serve? Who do you protect?" while the N.Y.P.D. does its best to ignore him.

The video has also been highly edited to slow down the portions where the cops attack a protester, but remain at normal speed (and in fact focuses the lens away from) the moments where irate crowd members actually push police officers who are trying to force them back on the sidewalk. According to other outlets, the protesters weren't just screaming slogans either: ABC news reports the "goading" calls of people screaming "No justice, dirty pigs, cops come here," possibly in an attempt to get arrested themselves. They also pushed through the orange netting and cut through the ropes the police had set up to barricade protesters from the street.

If anything, the video works against OWS: if it was supposed to garner any sympathy towards the cause and bring awareness to the violence in Oakland on Tuesday--when a police/protester clash lead to several people being severely injured (one of whom, Iraq war veteran and U.S. Marine Scott Olsen, recieved a fractured skull during the fray)--it failed on several levels. It's highly edited and not "raw footage," and thus makes itself as open to criticism as any Fox video. It also doesn't make the protesters themselves look very good: instead of showing the police blindly attacking peaceful protesters, what we see here is an angry mob trying to push through a wall of cops in riot gear who, for the most part, refuse to take the bait.

“It was a personal matter, it might have gotten a little out of hand, but I think they handled it,” a neighborhood type told The Brooklyn Paper.

Oh the intrigue! Next stop, NYC Mob Tour! Watch out Sparks Steakhouse!

First, liberal writers declared that Jared Lee Loughner was the product of right-wing incitement: Sarah Palin shamefully putting cross hairs over liberal congressmen's districts; Michele Bachmann's call to Tea Party legions to be "armed and dangerous"; the unbelievable rhetorical fury against President Obama; the right-wing portrayal of the president as Hitler. 

Then the vigilant powers of the Internet revealed that, in fact, Mr. Loughner was an atheist who spouted, insofar as they were coherent at all, both right-wing and left-wing ideas. So other liberal writers added that even if he wasn't the creation of right-wing incitement to violence, he was the product of the violent atmosphere that the right-wing incitement to violence had created. 

It then emerged that Mr. Loughner might be mentally ill. Yes, cried still other liberal writers. Maybe he is insane, and maybe he is not a right-winger, but you take the right-wing atmosphere of hatred, combine it with easy access to automatic weapons, and it becomes lethal when added to mental illness.

Conservative writers quickly used the insanity defense to exculpate the Palins and the Bachmanns. Other conservative writers struck back with examples of left-wing incitement to violence: the liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas shamefully putting a bull's-eye on Gabrielle Giffords because she was a Blue Dog Democrat; Mr.  Obama's threat to Republicans in the summer of 2008 that "if they bring a  knife to the fight, we bring a gun"; the unbelievable fury against President George W. Bush; the left-wing portrayal of Mr. Bush as Hitler.  

After a fleeting online eternity of each side giving gainful employment to the other, a sort of synthesis of opposites was reached by some liberal and some conservative pundits. It wasn't right-wing hatred, or left-wing hatred, or the general lack of civility in American politics that had caused Loughner to unleash his slaughter in Tucson. 

No, it was the "shadowy" world of "crazy" inhabited by American's assassins, a hermetically sealed Da Vinci Code realm sealed against all outer influences and driven by an internal logic all its own. Strangely, this vision of a select group of assassins guided by esoteric notions of conspiracy and injustice was strikingly similar to American assassins' own self-image as special aristocratic persons. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Mark David Chapman, Jared Lee Loughner-the three names reflect a fantasy of specialness that perhaps corresponds to the fantasy of absolute power these figures experience in murdering a special person.

The discourse following the Tucson shootings was all the more mind-numbing because no one wanted to talk about the elephant in the room. The uncomfortable fact is that we share the same culture as Loughner. We swim in it; we bask in it. Loughner's YouTube ravings are like a perverted reflection of ideas and sentiments that are our daily bread.

According to news reports, Loughner went to one of Congresswoman Giffords' public meetings and asked her this question: "What is government if words have no meaning?" It also appears in his YouTube video. In the light of what later happened, the question  chills us. Its nihilism and its unbalanced lack of basic trust are haunting. Yet they are also the stuff, not just of right-wing suspicion of government, or of radical left-wing suspicion of same, but of scores of Hollywood movies, from Taxi Driver and Three Days of the Condor, to Guilty by Suspicion and Mercury Rising, to The Sentinel and Syriana, and, well, I can't keep up. For at least half a century, our movies, from simple to complex, have been driven by the idea that official words have no meaning and that government is either criminal or a sham. 

If that strikes you as too earnest an assertion, then you are perhaps too sophisticated to draw moralizing conclusions from mere entertainment. In that case, you have probably read the standard texts of advanced American attitudes. Thus you have absorbed throughout college, like any number of Hollywood screenwriters and American tastemakers, the idea-from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein to Foucault to Derrida to Chomsky to Stanley Fish-that the words used by any type of official, political entity, like a government, are nonsense. "What is government if words have no meaning?" That could be the motto of The Daily Show.

There are other people who ask the question not in the spirit of intellectual smugness or cleverly calculated comedy but in rage: What is government if words have no meaning? I'm not only referring to Tea Party people. One or two ugly twists of Julian Assange, and you get Jared Lee Loughner. 

It goes without saying that we are not all potential Jared Lee Loughners. We are decent, ironic, cosmopolitan people horrified by the Loughners of the world, are we not? We are not killers no matter how much we enjoy being diverted by the spectacle of killing in movies, TV shows, video games, violent apps. But a mountain slide pulls  down everyone, good and evil, innocent and corrupt, in its rush to the bottom. We all dwell complacently among the same cultural assumptions. Some of those assumptions are helping to  drive society, through no conscious purpose of their own, to the bottom. The feeble-minded, like Loughner, are the first to sink.

But so many of us refuse to acknowledge the context we all share. Hours after the Tucson murders,  some commentators myopically  asked if Congress would ever be the same. The idea that the Tucson shooting might have the effect of changing the way Congress does the national  business was an insult to one particularly agonizing symptom of our  collective anguish.

America has more mass murders, unrelated to politics or criminal business, than any other prosperous, peacetime, democratic  country.  In shopping centers and post offices, in schools and on  military bases, in every type of workplace and on the street,  Americans are gunning each other down in groups. Incredibly, mass slaughter happens several times a month. Conservatives don't want to make an issue of mass murder because then they would be confronted with the fact that  the massacres are committed by people using guns. Liberals don't want to  cry out about it because then they would have to address the fact that the  violence of our entertainment,  as well as the hip nihilism of advanced taste, numb us to real  murder. So the mass slaughters proceed.

Yet when a member of Congress is shot along with other innocent people, Congress becomes concerned about mass  murder. It wasn't long after Tucson that figures in both parties started  saying there should be more bipartisanship. They proposed that the two  sides listen more carefully to each other. Certain pundits, those  opportunistic clowns who sit at the feet of Olbermann and O'Reilly,  obsequiously yapping condemnations of the other side, are pretending to ask themselves the same thing. But why does concern for their own welfare suddenly make the politicians speak words with meaning, and not concern for ours, or concern for the social and economic forces that drive some  people over the edge and put us all in jeopardy? 

Is it really true that  Congress will consider working more in the public interest only after one  of their own is heinously assaulted? Is it true that they and the entire  political culture will stop the self-sustaining and self-serving pendulum  of blame and invective onl
y after a congressman has been shot? Another Jared Lee Loughner is out there, asking himself the same question.  

lsiegel@observer.com

"Anyone have a friend over at NY Eye & Ear on E 14th st? need a favor.. [sic]," wrote Chi'en on Tuesday.

According to the Daily News, Chi'en is undergoing reconstructive surgery today. His injuries included six facial fractures.

Chi'en joined WPIX in 2005 after he was fired from WCBS for dropping an on-air F-bomb when a heckler interrupted one of his live shots. Luckily for Chi'en (and network censors) the clown attack wasn't captured on camera.

A representative for the NYPD told The Observer that, as of this writing, the unknown clown was still at large.

The Daily News is reporting that an off-duty police officer may have pulled his gun on a cyclist Saturday night as the two vied for space on Bleecker Street. The biker tried to confront the driver, knocking on the "heavily tinted" window of his black Volkswagen GTI, the off-duty officer brandished his pistol in reply. The cyclist called 9-1-1, and when he saw two cop cars near the Wagen, he told the officers about it, who quickly surrounded the car.

When the cop inside identified himself, the officers turned on the cyclist instead. "They started getting physical with him," the biker's attorney told the News. "He got upset, but he certainly didn't break any laws."

Granted cop-on-bike animosity is nothing new, having grown increasingly worse since the 2004 Republican Convention led to a swell of arrests for bicycle protesters. Most infamously, there was the case last year of Officer Patrick Pogan, who was caught on camera shoving a rider off his bike in Times Square. Pogan claimed he had been assaulted by the biker, and even threw him in jail for it, but a video later surfaced revealing the truth.

Perhaps there is some mysterious natural law at work here. Maybe the more mainstream cycling becomes, the more loathsome it gets, like Snuggies and beet salads. Maybe for every new bike lane that gets built, a cyclist must be accosted to pay for it.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo