More than a quarter of NYC shootings take place in just 6 of the 77 police districts, all of them in The Bronx and Brooklyn, according to a new report.
The “Mayor’s Management Report” highlights the neighborhoods with the most gun violence incidents – Mott Haven, Morrisania and Woodlawn in The Bronx, and Brownsville, East New York and Cypress Hill in Brooklyn, where approximately 27% of all shootings take place.
“I’m tired of it. Sometimes you can’t even sleep because of the shootings,” Ralph Campbell, 59, who has lived in his Brownsville neighborhood since he was a teenager, told the New York Post. “You’re in your kitchen. You’re getting shot at. It’s not safe.”
NYPD and law enforcement experts blamed the rise in crime on the release of prisoners since the pandemic to prevent contagions of the coronavirus and lenient state laws that make it difficult to keep repeat offenders behind bars. “These are historically high-crime precincts,” explained Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and now a professor at John Jay College.
“You’ve gotten to the point where you’re not going to have the manpower to do these things,” he said, referring to another problem: the loss of officers in the NYPD ranks, as many have left citing “frustration” over permissive laws.
“If they can’t get Albany (NYPD headquarters) on board to change some of these ridiculous laws they’ve created and you can’t get prosecutors on board to do their job, then this whole thing will collapse under its own weight,” Giacalone ironized.
Cops are trying to stem the violence by beefing up manpower in the NYPD’s Gun Suppression Division, which now has 262 uniformed officers, and deploying new anti-gun units called “Neighborhood Safety Teams.”
The city’s plan to end gun violence removed more than 6,600 firearms from the streets through October, according to the report released by the office of Mayor Eric Adams, formerly NYPD.
During the first four months of the city’s fiscal year, which began July 1, 2022, shootings were down 16% and gun arrests were up 140%, according to the report.
An unidentified veteran Brooklyn police officer stressed that gunmen are often “repeat offenders.” “That’s really what it comes down to,” he said. “Nobody is afraid of that (penal) system. Nobody is being locked up. It’s the same people you know … There’s no care for life. They don’t really care. Nothing fazed them. Until you start putting people in jail, it’s going to be the same. That’s really what it comes down to now. No one is afraid of the system.“
Last week two men on parole committed six robberies at gunpoint within hours in four of New York City’s five boroughs, and when they were arrested, one of them boasted that he would be free in short order thanks to the state’s controversial penal reform laws that take effect in January 2020.
Also in late January, the state Legislature building hosted a meeting between Mayor Adams’ administration – which is urging Albany to make changes to penal reform such as the bail law and tough treatment for repeat offenders – and legislators from his own Democratic Party who defend those regulations.
At the same time, young people are increasingly playing a central role in New York’s gun violence as both victims and perpetrators, particularly in shootings and knife attacks. In September, an NYPD report found that teen recidivism had risen dramatically over the past five years, and the number of gunmen and their underage victims had tripled.