The country is reeling after a pair of tragic mass shootings in Georgia and Colorado, events that were quick to draw national headlines. Closer to home, a gun crisis continues to brew in New York City.
As of Sunday, 246 people had been shot across 220 different incidents since the beginning of 2021, up 40% from the same period in 2020 and a 66% rise from two years ago. The last time New York City saw this many shooting incidents by late March was in 2012.
A recent spate of gunfire on three separate days this month at the public housing complex Woodside Houses in Queens highlights the shroud of violence blanketing the city. On Wednesday, a 32-year-old man was injured in a shooting at the building complex. That came after a mother of two was shot and killed after getting caught in crossfire earlier this month, and a 29-year-old was shot multiple times on Tuesday afternoon. Local leaders rallied against the violence on Thursday in the neighborhood, among 10 precincts where violence prevention groups are anticipated to expand by the summer, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced this month.
This continued surge in gun violence follows a year where 280 shooting incidents led to murders, the highest mark since 2011. Last summer, New York City had just begun to reopen as COVID-19 deaths receded when a different epidemic broke out.
Weekend after weekend, New Yorkers were injured or killed in shootings. They would include a teenage high school basketball star and a one-year-old baby. The highest number of shootings occurred in neighborhoods with Black and Latinx residents who were also unduly impacted by COVID-19. Ahead of Labor Day, violence interrupters—community members tasked with gun violence prevention—pleaded for more resources to spread their reach further as the city passed 1,000 shootings, double the year prior.
Jeffrey Butts, the director of the Research & Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says the pandemic has exacerbated societal shortcomings that existed well before the health crisis. Drastic changes to life—such as rampant job loss—in the past year could have spurred the spike in gun violence—reversing consistent reductions in gun violence seen since the early 1990s when the number of shooting incidents reached more than 5,000. Last year, there were 1,531 shootings. Murders in 2021 are also down 24% relative to 11 years ago as of Sunday. Given the surge in violence is following a historically low era of crime, he cautions the upturn coincides with multiple crises.
“It's concerning that our society is so fragile as to see this increase in shootings in such a short time period with the external shock of a pandemic,” Butts said. “Most people would agree that the pandemic has affected the fabric of our society and culture.”
Social isolation has possibly created new challenges and stressors, said Charles Branas, chair of Columbia University’s epidemiology department and a faculty member of the university’s Scientific Union for the Reduction of Gun Violence (SURGE). According to New Orleans-based data consultant Jeff Asher, 51 of 57 major cities reported murder spikes in 2020. Newark, New Jersey was one of the cities where deaths remained flat, and when compared to other large metro areas in the U.S., the five boroughs had among lowest murder rate of about 5 per 100,000 people in 2020, followed by Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, according to the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.
Gun violence has “grown at an epidemic pace, much like the virus,” Branas said. But why? “We really haven’t pinned it down.”
“Our public safety strategies have to be comprehensive and innovative and not just focused on the police,” said Sheyla Delgado, a deputy director for analytics at the Research & Evaluation Center.
Branas added that gun violence is a disease in itself—one that also needs more research funding to understand. Following the two mass shootings, President Joe Biden called for an assault weapons ban and more background checks, but then on Thursday, hinted that gun reform might need to wait until after an infrastructure plan is in place.
“Mass shootings are the tragic tip of a much larger iceberg,” Branas said. In late 2019, a federal funding ban on studying the issue was lifted, pouring $25 million into the endeavors last year. But Branas’s research group at Columbia says this number is a quarter of what the National Institutes of Health's budget needs to address the gun crisis.