NYC Mayor Revives A 1970 PD Program To Get Guns Off Streets It Failed Then

We can make this happen but not by going back to programs from the past that made us shoot ourselves and people who should not have been killed by PD.

This new mayor Mr. Adams is black and he wants to bring to NYC police profiling and abuses that got Mr. Floyd and others killed. I would imagine that he thinks the black community will give him a pass because he is black. We will have to wait and see. Blacks are usually the most affected by street crime but they are also the target of police. I don't see any good coming out of an old program that did not work. Then why do we have more guns? Simply we have more guns because we have more crime and most of the people committing crimes with guns or knives are felons or guys/girls released from Rikers Island. The police the previous mayor said he will close. This one here appointed someone close to him to the position of commander of Rikers so I'm sure he is not going to close it and have to put his buddy someplace else. People are already talking about appointing family and friends to the highest positions. What do you call that? I forgot. Cut the number of criminals walking the street and then cut the supply of cheap guns and stolen guns. But I will ask you who carries a stolen gun bought on the black market? Its not for defense but to get a way of living out of it. Two years ago we are talking not necessarily of defunding the police of course but on certain budgets adding people that are experts on the crimes and the reasons they are mitted and who do commit them. This is 2022 and we have answers we did not have in 1970 so to go back looks and sounds to me like a man without answers.

Adam for

adamfoxie.blogspot.com

This is what 

By Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Ashley Southall on the NY Times

have to say:

Mayor Eric Adams, facing severe pressure to address a growing crisis of gun violence in New York City, announced an ambitious public safety plan on Monday in what has quickly become a pivotal moment in his first weeks in office.

In a solemn speech just three days after a police officer was killed in Manhattan, Mr. Adams called for immediate changes to add police officers to city streets to remove guns, and for help from the courts and state lawmakers in the months ahead.

“We will not surrender our city to the violent few,” Mr. Adams said.

Mr. Adams’s plan included the restoration of an anti-gun police unit, and called on state lawmakers to make a number of changes, including to New York’s bail law and to a law that altered how the state handles teenage defendants.

“I want to be clear: This is not just a plan for the future — it is a plan for right now,” the mayor said. “Gun violence is a public health crisis. There is no time to wait.”

Gun violence rose sharply during the pandemic, as historic lows gave way to the highest number of shootings in a decade, and the number of murders approached 500 in 2021. The totals were still far from the worst days in the early 1990s, but they fueled fears that helped propel Mr. Adams to a victory last year with a promise to improve safety.

The spate of recent high-profile shootings, including four incidents in which police officers were wounded this year, has continued to change the tenor of criminal justice discussions and policy.

In a sign of the shifting concerns, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, said earlier in the day that he would aggressively prosecute gun-related crimes, including possession — a seeming response to pushback for his adoption of lenient policies upon taking office. He had said during his campaign last year that he would avoid prosecuting people for gun possession unless they were actually involved in violent crime.

“If you’re walking around Manhattan with a gun, you’re going to be prosecuted and we’re going to hold you accountable in what I would say is the traditional sense,” Mr. Bragg said on Monday.

Many of the issues that are helping to fuel the current spike in violent crime are complex — including how to assist New Yorkers with mental health problems and the omnipresence of guns — and will be difficult to fix quickly. 

Mr. Adams, a former police captain, called on the courts and state lawmakers to take gun offenses more seriously. He said that he would appoint judges who wanted to keep violent criminals off the streets, and would work with state lawmakers to change laws concerning bail for defendants who are considered dangerous, and the minimum age that someone can be charged as an adult.

Guns and Gun Control in the U.S.

The Children's Gun Crisis: More kids are becoming both victims and shooters, as pandemic trauma and a surge in gun purchases collide.

Understand ‘Ghost Guns’: Untraceable firearms that can be ordered online are fueling an epidemic of violence.

Inside 2021’s Homicide Surge: These four stories offer a glimpse of the scope and toll of gun violence in America.

A Landmark Case: The Supreme Court is poised to issue its first major Second Amendment ruling in more than a decade — and the implications could be enormous.

America’s Arms Race: While gun sales have been climbing for decades, Americans have been on a buying spree fueled by the pandemic.

Perhaps the most immediate change offered by Mr. Adams on Monday was the highly anticipated revamping of anti-crime police units that were disbanded in 2020 amid social-justice protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd.

Police officials in New York City have identified hundreds of candidates to be assigned to the new units, called Neighborhood Safety Teams, which are expected to be introduced over the next three weeks in 30 precincts across the city where, according to the mayor’s plan, 80 percent of violence occurs.

Unlike the disbanded anti-crime units, the plainclothes teams would wear a piece of police insignia like a windbreaker and be equipped with body cameras, Mr. Adams said. But the officers would not wear uniforms and would travel in unmarked vehicles.

Some left-leaning Democrats criticized the mayor’s plan. Tiffany Cabán, a new City Council member from Queens, said she was “strongly opposed” to revising bail reform and called the return of the anti-crime unit “particularly troubling.”

The plan for Neighborhood Safety Teams fulfills Mr. Adams’s campaign promise to reimagine the anti-crime units, whose primary role was finding illegal weapons. But it has also raised concern among community activists and civil rights lawyers that the city is returning to heavy-handed practices that led to the deaths of Amadou Diallo and Eric Garner, and which were often abused in ways that alienated communities of color.

Akeem Browder, whose teenage brother, Kalief, became a symbol of criminal justice reform after he was held for three years at Rikers Island without trial, said the mayor’s plan was ill-conceived.

  

“This is just another slap in the face leading us to a police state,” he said, adding, “I think that’s what his whole administration is going to be about, fullness for the police and emptiness for the people.”

Mr. Adams’s plan calls for the city to conduct listening tours in precincts where the teams operate, and the mayor said his administration would “avoid the mistakes of the past” by making sure officers on the teams receive enhanced training and additional oversight.

“We’re not looking to be heavy-handed, but we’re not looking to be dangerous to our city,” he told reporters after his speech. “And I’m going to find and strike that right balance.”

Mr. Adams called for harsher prosecution of young people charged with gun possession who were not willing to say where they had obtained the weapons, saying that such defendants should be tried as adults and potentially face stronger penalties.

He also argued that the “Raise the Age” law that increased the age of criminal responsibility was being used by gang members to make younger children take responsibility for gun crimes. The mayor cited statistics showing that the share of children under 18 arrested on gun charges quadrupled from 2.5 percent in 2019 to 10 percent in 2021. It was not clear if the increase was due to more children being arrested with guns, or fewer children being arrested overall.

The plan includes a list of requests for state and federal officials that shows how many of the challenges Mr. Adams is facing are difficult for the city to tackle on its own.

Mr. Adams has a friendly relationship with Gov. Kathy Hochul and said that he expected she would work him on the changes needed at the state level. He called her an “amazing partner” and said that “she gets it.” 

“I think she understands that we’re at a real crossroads on safety in the city,” he said.

The governor did not comment directly on Mr. Adams’s plan, but her team pointed to a tweet from Ms. Hochul that called the mayor her “public safety partner.”

“We have a moral obligation to confront the gun violence epidemic, and that means working with leaders at all levels of government to keep New Yorkers safe,” it read.

Legislative leaders were noncommittal on how they would treat Mr. Adams’s requests. Carl E. Heastie, the Assembly speaker, said he appreciated the mayor’s plan, but suggested that to improve the Raise the Age law, Mr. Adams should first “review and improve pretrial services in the probation department, which he oversees.”

Senator Michael Gianaris, the Democrats’ deputy majority leader, said the mayor’s plan suggests that he has sided with forces seeking to “demagogue this issue rather than focus on real data.”

“We’ll hear him out, give him the opportunity to convince us otherwise,” Mr. Gianaris said. “But it’s a lot of what we’ve already heard and we’ve evaluated, and the data is telling us otherwise.”

The mayor is facing challenges old and new. The flow of illegal guns into the city from other states has long limited the effectiveness of efforts to reduce gun violence, and the recent proliferation of so-called ghost guns, which lack serial numbers and cannot be traced, poses a growing threat.

Mr. Adams’s announcement received a warmer reception from the city’s largest police union, the Police Benevolent Association. Its president, Patrick J. Lynch, praised the mayor for trying to counter the street narrative that “there are no consequences for carrying and using illegal guns.” 

But progressive lawmakers and criminal justice reform activists rejected the mayor’s calls to allow judges to consider dangerousness when setting bail or to allow harsher prosecutions for gun crimes under Raise the Age. Anthonine Pierre, the deputy director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, a nonprofit, said that the plan offered by the mayor was little more than an expansion of policing cloaked in the language of public health. “That’s the part that’s most disturbing about what the mayor is saying,” she said.

Gangs putting guns in the hands of young children has been a problem for decades, she noted, but the city has failed to provide the social services those children and their families need. “If there’s anyone who needs to be in Family Court, it’s a 12-year-old who has been convinced to carry a gun,” she said.

In the past month, Mr. Adams has responded to the scenes of several violent incidents: a woman pushed to her death at a Times Square subway station; a baby shot in the Bronx; a 19-year-old Burger King worker killed during a robbery in Manhattan. Police officers have also been wounded in shootings in the Bronx, East Harlem and on Staten Island.

But the shooting death on Friday of Officer Jason Rivera — whose partner, Officer Wilbert Mora, was also gravely wounded — poses the greatest challenge to Mr. Adams early in his mayoralty. (The suspect, Lashawn McNeil, was shot by a third officer and died on Monday from his wounds.)

A few hours before Mr. Adams’s speech, the city’s public advocate, Jumaane D. Williams, offered his own public safety recommendations, focusing on building on progressive policies that have been credited with helping the city reach record-low levels of gun violence before the pandemic.

Mr. Williams, a Democrat like Mr. Adams and a candidate for governor, sought to offer a different path from the mayor that placed a priority on empowering communities through initiatives like investing in community-run recreational spaces and paying local residents to learn conflict-mediation skills.

“We can build safer, stronger communities without relying on strategies which in the past have inflicted lasting harm,” Mr. Williams said. “This is not a time to lose the lessons that we have learned.”

Grace Ashford and Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.

Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall bureau chief, covering politics in New York City. She previously covered the transit beat and breaking news. @emmagf

Ashley Southall is a law enforcement reporter focused on crime and policing in New York City. @AshleyatTimes