NEW YORK — City jail stabbings and slashings are on an alarming rise even as the numbers of detainees sinks, city statistics show.
For the first seven months of 2022, 296 such incidents were reported — up a dizzying 71% from the 173 reported in the same period last year, the data show. The number of stabbings and slashings in July alone hit 42, nearly matching the 44 reported in the first seven months of 2016 — the year a federal monitor was named to address jail violence.
The troubling spike comes even though the city’s jail population has plunged in the last six years. The stabbings so far this year are spread across a detainee population of fewer than 6,000, while the double-digit count in the same period in 2016 was across a population of about 10,000.
