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| Footage of Attack |
An Upper West Side man is cold-cocked in Chelsea.
An unhinged stranger throws a roundhouse at a woman outside a subway station on the Upper West Side.
A Catholic deacon and another man are pummeled in separate smackdowns in the Bronx.
It’s up for debate whether this spate of disturbing incidents is a return of the so-called knockout game, the sick spree of assaults that terrorized New Yorkers a few years ago, but it’s a still a gut-punch to frightened residents already on edge.
One poster to the Upper West Side Together Facebook group put members on high alert two weeks ago after two friends walking past the subway station exit on Central Park West and 87th Street encountered a man dressed in black coming out of the subway.
He tried “tried to sucker punch” the girl, whose boyfriend then chased him off.
“My friend was screaming, ran to a building on CPW (Central Park West) where doorman called police,” the poster explained.
An Upper West Side man responded, “This is happening all over. I was sucker punched by a disturbed man in Chelsea” — and left with two black eyes.
On Monday a stranger punched a 67-year-old man in the face on a Queens subway platform in an apparent unprovoked attack, police said.
The suspect walked up to the man shortly before 10 a.m. as he waited for a Manhattan-bound 7 train at the Court Square station.
“These incidents aren’t happening in front of officers. They are happening due to opportunists taking advantage of the anti-police, anti-accountability era,” NYPD Sgt. Joseph Imperatrice, the founder of Blue Lives Matter NYC and a 15-year-veteran, told The Post.
“It is a dangerous time to be out and about strolling in New York City. The combination of criminals and mentally ill individuals roaming the streets equals disaster waiting to happen.
“The city needs to get back to old-school policing … high visibility foot posts and patrol,” he added.
Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, noted “a number of attacks that some would term as ‘sucker punches’ against seniors and children in NYC, the most recent in the Bronx.
“It might be the power of social media that makes the perception that it’s happening everywhere, but it is a real concern that shouldn’t be taken lightly.”
The NYPD, when asked if about knockout game or unproved-punch trends, said, “data is not kept to that level of specificity.”
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