New York is experiencing the worst gun violence it has seen in nearly a decade, all while it continues to fight a pandemic that has killed tens of thousands of New Yorkers and left many more jobless and hungry.
In 2021 alone, 299 people have been shot, a 54% increase over the same time last year, and the most the city has seen since 2012.
Ninety-two people have been murdered, a 19.5% jump, according to the most recent NYPD data. In 2020, the city recorded 462 murders, an increase of 45% from 2019, even as most other major felonies declined. Shooting incidents overall exploded 97% last year.
New York is not unique. Murders across the United States rose an estimated 25% in 2020, according to preliminary data from the FBI, the largest increase since modern crime statistics have been compiled. Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles all had higher murder rates than New York City in 2020.
But New York’s wave of gun violence is coming at a pivotal moment in the city’s history. In June, Democratic primary voters will likely choose the next mayor. That same month, the city’s budget will be due, setting up another massive public battle over whether to redirect money from the NYPD to the city’s poorer communities, predominately Black and Latino, who are disproportionately affected by gun violence.
NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea has continued to insist that criminal justice reforms, including the state’s 2019 bail reform laws that went into effect last year, are driving the increase in violent crime, despite evidence to the contrary. The reforms prohibited judges from setting bail in most cases, except those charged with violent felonies.
“We have one simple ask,” Shea told an interviewer last week, after a Brownsville man killed his girlfriend and two of her children before turning the gun on himself. “We need to give judges discretion to keep dangerous people in jail.”
According to a report released by the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice in January, between 95% and 97% of the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who were arrested and charged with a crime in 2020 were not rearrested for another crime while awaiting their case. Of the group who were rearrested after being released without bail, less than 1% were charged with a violent felony.
Of the roughly 9,000 New Yorkers awaiting trial on a violent felony charge in September of 2020, 96% were not rearrested on any charge, and 99% were not arrested for another violent felony, according to the report. These figures have remained steady before and after bail reform was passed
“There isn’t a viable, reliable connection between, these folks are being released pretrial, and these are the same folks who are going out picking up guns and committing shootings and other serious crimes,” said Krystal Rodriguez, the deputy director of jail reform at the Center for Court Innovation.
If anything, New York’s judges increased the number of cases in which they set bail in the latter half of 2020, a rise that a Center for Court Innovation study attributes in part to “unsupported claims from public officials, amplified in the media, that bail reform was a primary factor in New York City’s spike in shootings and murders in 2020.”
The NYPD did not respond to our questions about Shea’s statements.
Asked about the increase in gun violence on Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio argued that state-mandated COVID-19 restrictions are hamstringing the court system, leading to more violent crime.
“Remember our court system is not functioning right now and that is making it bad for everyone,” de Blasio told a reporter. “We don't run the courts. The State of New York needs to bring back our court system.”
Lucian Chalfen, a spokesperson for the state court system, pointed out that the court system is running and regularly arraigning defendants after they are arrested. While in-person jury trials resumed three weeks ago, grand juries have been meeting since July.
“Virtually, just last week, we commenced more than 1,200 bench trials and hearings (no jury) and conferenced 23,870 matters – both civil and criminal,” Chalfen wrote in an email. “On a daily basis NYC Criminal Court arraigns anywhere from 175-250 defendants, including 3 to a dozen illegal gun possession cases and holds other hearings in lieu of grand jury presentations.”
“You could say A, the pandemic obviously is driving [the rise in shootings]to an extent,” said Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former NYPD crime analyst. “And B, you can’t blame bail reform, because there are other cities like Milwaukee and Kansas City, who are having much worse shooting and homicide problems than we are per capita, and again, they’re not going through that bail reform stuff yet.”
Jullian Harris-Calvin, the director of the Greater Justice New York program for the Vera Institute, said that while it will take years to fully understand COVID-19’s influence on violent crime, it is undeniable that the mass death, unemployment, and economic instability that accompanied the pandemic literally upended society, especially for people who are traditionally harmed by gun violence.
“COVID-19 had a unique affect on familial and community support systems. It disproportionately affected Black and brown communities,” Harris-Calvin said.
“Programs and activities that help communities produce safety, from after-school programs, to gyms, to violence interruption programs, they were closed or severely limited,” she said. “All of these informal and formal systems and networks that typically mitigate violence, particularly for youth...were either shut down, or they were sick and dying. Or losing their jobs. Or had other stressors on them to prevent them from being the strong networks that existed before.”
At the press conference on Tuesday, elected officials and dozens of community mediators urged the city to restore these networks and increase investments in anti-violence programs in neighborhoods like East New York, Brownsville, and Mott Haven, which are among the neighborhoods that saw the most shootings in 2020.
“We know that gun violence is a health crisis, it requires a holistic response, not just police,” Bronx Councilmember Vanessa Gibson said. “We need programs, and we have the ability in our budgets to make a difference, and say to our people, we have something better for you, young king. We have something better for you, young queen.”
Mayor de Blasio increased anti-violence program funding by $10 million in last year’s angrily contested city budget, which also purported to cut the NYPD’s $11 billion overall budget by $1 billion. But those cuts were more akin to cost shifting, and the police department is on track to exceed its overtime budget, essentially negating more than $300 million of those cost savings.
Herrmann, the CUNY professor, said that while he supported this “every little bit helps” strategy, and noted that the NYPD has signficiantly increased the number of weapons arrests this year, gun reform is both politically and practically daunting.
“There’s an estimated 300 million guns in America, the damage is done to an extent,” Herrmann said. (Some estimates put the number closer to 400 million.)
President Biden’s infrastructure bill that was recently passed by Congress also earmarks billions of dollars for violence prevention nationwide, but a spokesperson for the mayor said it was too early to tell how much New York would receive. Studies in New York and Chicago have shown anti-violence programs to be effective at decreasing shootings.
“You can’t have a city budget that increases the NYPD and decreases everybody else,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams told the crowd on Tuesday.
Sekou, of Street Corner Resources, insisted that the investment in community organizations should not be symbolic.
“Not a few dollars, to make it look good, because you’re an elected official, and you’re running the city,” she said. “We need to make sure the kind of money that’s put into incarceration, that’s put into incarceration, is put into our young people in our communities so they don’t see a cell ever. We can do that.”