LOWER MANHATTAN — Gun violence is on the rise in New York City, but in Lower Manhattan, shootings remain a pretty rare occurrence, according to data and police.
While the number of shooting victims have gone up 10.3 percent in the city overall, compared to this time last year, a gun hasn't been used in a crime since 2013 in Downtown's 1st Precinct.
According to police data, Lower Manhattan is also one of just three areas in New York City where no one was shot last year, and so far this year. The other two neighborhoods without gun violence: the Upper East Side and Flushing.
The last shooting in the 1st Precinct — which covers the Financial District, TriBeCa, Battery Park City, the South Street Seaport, Hudson Square and SoHo — happened at SOB's in Sept. 2013, when a gunman opened fire in the nightclub during rapper Fat Trel's concert. Four men were injured, but all recovered.
Previous to that, police from the 1st precinct said there was a shooting near the violence-plagued club Greenhouse, which is now shuttered, after men got into a fight over a parking spot near the bar in 2010. Another man was shot in 2009, killed on a party boat docked at the South Street Seaport.
But before 2009, several police, who've been with the 1st Precinct upwards of 20 years, said that there hadn't been a shooting since about 1999.
"Shootings just don't really happen here that often," a police source said. "They're usually related to a nightclub, but that doesn't really happen that often either, thankfully."
