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Nearly 70 percent of New York City’s shootings this year are unsolved, and more than half of the suspects arrested in the gunplay are back out on the streets, The Post has learned.
Police have arrested a suspect in 483 of the 1,525 shootings this year — a clearance rate of only 31.7 percent, according to NYPD data through Dec. 29.
Because multiple perps were arrested in some shootings, the number of individuals collared through Dec. 17 was 544, or an average of about 1.2 people per incident.
But of these 544 trigger-happy defendants, only 254 — about 47 percent — are currently in state or city custody, according to the NYPD.
Among the unsolved cases is the shocking stray-bullet slaying of Brooklyn baby Davell Gardner in July. Just two months shy of his second birthday, the toddler was senseless collateral damage in a long-running feud between rival Bedford-Stuyvesant gangs.
The tot was enjoying a family cookout near Raymond Bush Playground on July 12 when a stray slug fatally struck his stomach as his heartbroken mother looked on.
“It’s been hard,” Samantha Gardner, the tragic tot’s paternal grandmother, recently told The Post. “My son is not good. He’s taken it very hard. It’s the holidays, and instead of celebrating he’s going to the cemetery.”
The stunning slaying struck a nerve with a shaken NYPD that has been dealing all year with the Big Apple shooting gallery.
“A one-year-old child is dead,” NYPD Chief of Community Affairs Jeffrey Maddrey tweeted the day after the killing. “This. Must. STOP! We as a community, we as a police department denounce this disgusting violence.”
Despite the failure to make an arrest in the murder, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said Tuesday that, “I think people know who did that case.”
Uncooperative witnesses are a big factor in not solving such shootings, Shea said during the briefing.
“I would say we know who does the shooting 80 to 90 percent of the time,” he said. “It’s knowing and getting a district attorney to be comfortable with moving forward with the prosecution, with witnesses that sometimes change their story or tell you, ‘This is who did it but I am not going to court.’”
The passage last year of state discovery laws compelling prosecutors to turn over witness identities to defense attorneys did investigators no favors in cracking cases, Shea noted.
“We go to court and the first thing the district attorney says is, ‘I have to tell you this: I’m going to try to protect your identity, but I cannot protect your identity guaranteed,’” said Shea. “And people literally stand up and walk out of the district attorney’s office.”
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