With the Year of the Horse beginning on January 31, Chinese New

With the Year of the Horse beginning on January 31, Chinese New Yorkers, as is the tradition in celebrating the Lunar New Year, are beginning to give their children red envelopes filled with cash. And more people walking around with cash may well be magnets for criminals.

Alert to the problem, Brooklyn Bureau‘s Nathan Oder reports, police in two precincts in Sunset Park, the 72nd and the 66th, will be stepping up their patrols beginning January 23. The two precincts lie on either side of 8th Avenue, the main avenue in Sunset Park.

For the third straight year, beginning Jan. 23, the precincts will paying extra attention to the territory between Sixth and Tenth avenues and 40th and 61st streets, said Captain James Grant, commanding officer of the 72nd. As a former officer and lieutenant in the 66th Precinct, Grant said, he recognized the need to add a police presence and not worry about precinct boundaries.

So NYPD will send in extra auxiliary police from around the city to patrol those streets in the evenings, and will assign extra officers as well. The police presence serves as a deterrent, Grant said. “The community was very happy” last year, he said. “We did see a decrease in grand larceny and burglary.”

The heightened police presence will include a mobile command center at 56th Street and Eighth Avenue. Both the patrols and the mobile command center will continue through February 2, the day of the Lunar New Year Parade on Eighth Avenue.

http://www.bkbureau.org/2014/01/22/sunset-park-cops-aim-to-protect-lunar-new-year-revelers/