Eight people are shot near Coney Island

Eight people were shot late Saturday near New York City’s Coney Island, including four children, in an attack police said came minutes after holiday fireworks and targeted a family barbecue. The NYPD said the gunfire erupted around 10:35pm in a courtyard near the boardwalk, and that a masked man dressed in black fired multiple rounds into the gathering before fleeing on foot, according to The Guardian and the Associated Press.

Police said all eight victims were taken to hospital, with one young woman reported in critical condition while the others were expected to survive, the AP reported via The Independent. Investigators recovered a pistol and shell casings at the scene, and as of the initial reports no arrests had been announced. The shooting landed as city leaders were promoting a very different set of numbers: NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch had said two days earlier that New York had recorded the fewest shootings, shooting victims and murders for the first half of the year in recorded history, The Guardian reported.

That juxtaposition—falling aggregate crime measures alongside a holiday-night burst of indiscriminate violence—captures the uneasy way American public safety is experienced: statistics move slowly, while risk arrives in spikes. The Guardian notes that Tisch said there was no sign of an argument at the barbecue before the shots were fired, suggesting the victims may not have been the intended targets. She also pointed to a recent gang-related homicide on the same block and said police were investigating a possible connection, a reminder that enforcement often chases networks after the fact rather than preventing the next pull of a trigger.

Nationally, the incident sits inside a calendar of routine mass shootings. The Gun Violence Archive had logged at least 215 mass shootings in the US so far this year, The Guardian reported, using the group’s definition of incidents in which four or more victims are wounded or killed. The same report said at least six mass shootings were recorded across the country on July 4, with more reported the following morning—an arithmetic of celebration weekends that has become predictable enough to be tabulated.

New York’s own policing story adds another layer. The Guardian reported that on the same night an NYPD officer from the sex offender monitoring unit was shot in the ballistic vest in Crown Heights in what appeared to be a targeted attack, with a suspect later arrested. The city can simultaneously claim historic lows in shootings and still deploy press briefings for multiple gun incidents within hours, because the operational burden is set by the outliers, not the averages.

In Coney Island, police said the victims were found in the courtyard where the family barbecue was taking place. A pistol and 10 shell casings were left behind on a block that had just finished watching fireworks.