Whether the so-called “knockout game” comes from coordinated violence or random mischief, there’s only one sane response: End it.
The goal of the knockout game is to bring a victim down with one punch, and then to upload the cellphone footage onto a Web site. And in the past few weeks, America’s seen a bunch of attacks that seem to fit this pattern, including as many as 12 attacks in New York. In our city, victims have been disproportionately Jewish.
Some people say the game is a myth hyped by the media. Others focus on the race of the attackers, primarily black and Latino men. Then there’s City Councilwoman-elect Laurie Cumbo — whose Crown Heights district has been the scene of some of the attacks. Cumbo suggested on Facebook that the “accomplishments of the Jewish community triggers feelings of resentment,” which might lend “insight” into “how young African American/Caribbean teens” could commit such attacks.
We prefer the Bill Bratton approach. On Saturday, the incoming police commissioner vowed to “attack trends like knockout the way a doctor goes after a basal cell before it becomes a melanoma.” That, he added, “is what we did with the wolf packs of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Go after them aggressively.”
Exactly. We’re less interested in the race of the attackers, or the sociology of politically correct apology. What concerns us is that innocent New Yorkers are being attacked — in the kind of assaults that have sometimes proved fatal — as they are going about their business of ordinary life.
Saturday evening, Brooklyn Borough President-elect Eric Adams, a former cop himself, cut to the chase in a radio interview: “Knockout is not a game. It’s an assault. It’s terrorizing people, and we got to put it to a halt.”
We repeat what The Post has said many times before in the face of ethnic violence: The problem of “hate crimes” isn’t the “hate.” It’s the crime.