Six-year-old boy among five people shot at J'Ouvert celebration in New York

Five people, including a six-year-old boy, were shot during a J’Ouvert celebration in New York early on Monday morning, according to police.

The shooting happened as a crowd of about 300 people gathered in the streets for the festivities, which mark freedom from slavery.

Police said calls came in at around 3am reporting the incident near Crown Street and Nostrand Avenue in the Crown Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn.

The boy was shot in the left leg, while his mother and a man were both hit in the left foot. Two other men were shot in the right leg, according to The New York Post.

All five were taken to Kings County Hospital Centre. Their injuries are not considered to be life threatening.

Two men were arrested and two guns were recovered, New York City Police Chief Terence Monahan tweeted.

He also called the shooting “senseless” and asked anyone with information to contact police.

No motive for the shooting is known and it is unclear if the victims were the intended targets.

Official celebrations for J’Ouvert and West Indian Day were cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, but crowds gathered anyway.

A heavy police presence remained in the area on Monday morning.

New York always sees a surge in violent crime over the summer, but this year the phenomenon has been especially acute.

Between May and the start of September there were 791 shootings, an increase of 140 per cent over 2019.

There was also a 51 per cent increase in murders over 2019, with 180 recorded over the summer, The New York Times reports.

To give perspective to the numbers, the last time there was a similar surge was in 2015, and neither then nor this year do the figures come anywhere near the peak of violent crime in the 1980s and 1990s.

Crime levels in the city in recent years have been at levels otherwise not seen since the 1950s.