Were there any adults without children eating donuts in the park? Was anyone smoking?

ohp nevermind. east flatbush. saw it.

anybody know  precisely which neighborhood this was?

For all you who are nostalgic for the city's grittier, edgier days of the 70's and 80's, you may be gradually getting your wish unfortunately.

These neighborhood NEVER got better, so there's no real gradual return.  Just swept under the table by stats. 

i believe this is the second homicide in this precient for this year, also it occurred less than 3 blocks from it, 

I tend to agree about "lesser" crimes, but it's really hard to statistically hide a homicide.

I grew up during those "grittier" days but this is something completely different. This is the garbage from the West Coast come to New York. Once upon a time, the mob and the police would tamp down on stuff like this by making sure the gangs who had little control over their members felt fearful enough to handle their own troublemakers. Now the gangs foster this sort of animal behavior and everyone stands around letting it happen.

Once more with feeling: All gang activity in the United States should be declared terrorism and the laws that are in place to handle terrorists brought to bear on every single gang. Round them up and send them to some black-ops prison in Eastern Europe where they can be handled.

I call BS .. the East Coast is the original home of violence and gang mayhem.

Quite right. Some of us base our opinions on firsthand memories of the time and we can see the difference, while others just look up statistics and, despite claiming to have PhDs, denigrate those who disagree with them with the usually inaccurate epithet, "transplants." Strangely, despite the raw numbers bandied about in an earlier comment, I never knew anyone who was murdered, nor did any of my friends and classmates.

I had no friends or classmates who got murdered either, but we never 'ran' with the bad kids. Still while my friends and I were having fun, many kids in my neighborhood got shot and killed. I wasn't part of the chaos but it sure was going on big time.

Wow, this got personal? So because you personally didn't know anyone who got murdered, it never happened?  Brilliant, brilliant thinking. Seriously - "I have firsthand experience limited solely to my experience so therefore it must be so" is all you have? "Oh, I don't care about facts - I remember the city was awesome back then, so it is so!"

By any rational metric, the city was shithole back then. Sorry you're longing for the days of hairy bush and disco, gramps, but it sucked for the tens of thousands of that were murdered, raped or otherwise victims of violent crime in this fundament of a city.

Hairy bush and disco.  Nice, lol.

A-ha! There we go. "Gramps." That confirms you're too young to have lived it yourself and you're just relying on hearsay. And correct me if I'm wrong, but did you or did you not begin the attacks with this very comment above: "I tend to think the people who are nostalgic for those days read about them when they were 15 and living in Wisconsin or wherever." For someone who claims to be very learned in sociology, you're not very social.

I tend to think the people who are nostalgic for those days read about them when they were 15 and living in Wisconsin or wherever.

Sorry, try again. My neighborhood was gritty in the 70s and still is.

I think the people who hate the old days never experienced either the bad times or the good back then. They just "heard" that times were awful. They don't know that kids getting shot wasn't a common occurrence in 1970s NYC.

The 70's and 80's marked the absolute rock bottom for the City. In 1980 alone 2,228 people were murdered in the city and 5405 people were forcibly raped. People were fleeing this city in droves because it was an unlivable zoo and taking with them the city's tax base. Tens of thousands of people that were murdered in the 70's and 80's and I'm sure there were a great many children among them, certainly a hell of a lot more than there are now.

You may bs nostalgic for the "good ol days" but some truly atrocious things happened then.

In the 70's and 80's all you heard every night was shots coming from the roofs of the projects. The so called "good old days" were pretty bad.