Shootings decline citywide, but remain high

Shootings and killings continued to decline citywide, despite a particularly violent Memorial Day weekend and a continued increase in overall crime, police said. 

Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD officials cited several reasons why shootings, which spiked in the first few months of the pandemic and remain high, might be plateauing and even trending downward. The mayor said the drop was attributable at least in part to the reconstitution in March of the NYPD’s anti-crime teams, now called Neighborhood Safety Teams, which have confiscated 105 firearms and made 115 gun arrests since then.

Shooting incidents declined 31 percent last month compared to May 2021, to 118. Despite that decrease, lethal gunplay in the city remains high compared to even the year before that: Shootings in May of last year spiked 73 percent compared to May 2020. 

Still, Commissioner Keechant Sewell said the decline last month was encouraging. 

“We have pointed every resource we have at reducing gun violence in this city. We have seen seven straight weeks of shootings going down — and that is not a coincidence,” she said in a statement accompanying the release of the crime data. 

Police last month made 414 gun arrests, bringing the total so far this year to just over 2,000 arrests, slightly more than last year, numbers Sewell said had not been reached in nearly 30 years. 

Overall index crime, though, rose nearly 28 percent, driven in large part by a 42 percent spike in grand larcenies, a 28 percent hike in burglaries and a 26 increase in robberies, the NYPD said. 

‘The worst of the worst’

During a June 6 event at which Adams and police officials discussed the arrests of a number of “trigger pullers,” Chief of Detectives James Essig said the “steady decline” in shootings could be traced to a number of gang takedowns in the last few weeks by the department's Gun Violence Suppression Division. Among those were the arrests of 22 alleged members of the River Park Towers organization, a Bloods-affiliated crew in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, on attempted murder, weapons and other charges in connection with several shootings.  

“These are specific targeted cases at people who are out there with a gun in their hand and think it's all right to shoot that gun in the city, sometimes hitting innocent people as we've seen tragically in the last few months,” Essig said. 

Jason Savino, the division’s commanding officer, said the people taken into custody, which he characterized as “trigger pullers,” were “by far the worst of the worst in the entire city … the alphas, the snakes’ heads of the neighborhoods.”

Mayor: Courts must step up

Adams said that criticism of the division’s methods, including that officers were rounding up innocent people, was misplaced. “They are laser focused on the shooters,” he said of the division’s 200 or so detectives, including some working undercover.

But he also again said that the state court system bears responsibility. “The courts have to prosecute. Judges have to make sure they stay in. Everyone has to do their part. If not, they go out and come back,” he said of alleged shooters.

The result, he continued, is that criminals no longer fear getting prosecuted. “They believe our criminal justice system is a laughing stock of our entire country,” Adams said.

But MK Kaishian, a civil rights attorney and advocate with the Justice Not Fear bail reform project, said the mayor’s and the department’s claims were misleading and detracted from “real solutions to the violence.”

“Adams’ insistence on positioning police and incarceration as solutions to violence cuts against all evidence and is rendered even more absurd in the light of recent high-profile but emblematic policing failures,” she said. 

Supreme Court could herald ‘wild West’

In response to questioning to what some fear will be a Supreme Court decision that finds the state’s relatively conservative concealed-carry law to be unconstitutional, Adams said city officials would look to put together a task force with representatives from cities across the nation that would then petition federal officials to draw up legislation to avert what he called a “wild, wild West” scenario. 

“If this right to carry goes through the Supreme Court and becomes the law of the land, can you imagine being on the 4 train with someone having a 9mm exposed? Everyone on the train is carrying?,” the mayor said. “So it's a real concern and we need to talk about it more.”