Dear New Yorkers,
The first month of 2022 has been a painful one for our city. In addition to grappling with a surge in infections amidst a global pandemic that has already brought so much loss, disruption, and isolation, and then the most devastating fire in decades, we are now mourning the victims of several terrifying acts of violence.
The heartbreaking deaths of Michelle Go on a subway platform, of 19-year-old Kristal Bayron-Nieves at a Burger King as she worked her overnight shift, and of Officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora responding to a domestic violence dispute have rightly shocked us. Each one of them was a beautiful New Yorker, full of so much promise and potential, fiercely loved by friends and family, working to contribute to our shared city. Jason Rivera’s letter about why he wanted to become an NYPD officer to help people in “this chaotic city” of ours captured this exquisitely.
The shock of their loss has not only caused agony for their loved ones, friends, and colleagues: it has also disrupted our collective sense of safety.
Still, reacting out of the fear, anger, and anxiety we are feeling makes for bad public policy.
We know this, because we’ve done it before. Out of the pain and suffering in reaction to crimes in the 1970s, we adopted harsh sentencing, excessive bail, and abusive stop-and-frisk policing that locked up generations of Black and brown young people, fueling the era of mass incarceration.
So what we need to do now is look at the evidence about what works to really make communities safer for the long term. A growing body of research about community safety helps to point the way. As sociologist Patrick Sharkey has shown, police are effective in reducing violence, but they can’t possibly do it alone – and over-relying on them badly limits investments in communities that are necessary to produce safety. When young people are engaged in after-school and summer jobs programs, when street outreach workers intervene to deescalate conflicts, when people experiencing mental health crises get the help they need, our cities become safer.
We’re already seeing this in New York City: “Cure Violence” programs that put community members on the street to interrupt and deescalate conflicts have seen great success at violence prevention: NYC's Crisis Management System has seen an 80% reduction in shootings in the focus areas in just a few years.
But we often treat these programs as afterthoughts, tacking on pocket change rather than treating them as essential parts of our public safety infrastructure. Even with recent increases, the Cure Violence programs represent less than 0.01% of the NYPD’s $11 billion budget. New York City spends more on the NYPD than we do on the Departments of Health and Mental Hygiene, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community Development combined.
In our streets and in our communities, we are seeing the consequences of spending more on policing than on healthy neighborhoods, mental health services, affordable housing, and youth programming.
We also need to seriously reckon with the consequences of going backwards in the fight for civil rights. The plainclothes anti-crime unit resurrected this week has a very harmful track record—nearly 1/3rd of the police killings since 2000 (including the killing of Sean Bell, Kimani Gray, Eric Garner, and Amadou Diallo) were officers in that unit. Claims filed against the NYPD, including by New Yorkers whose civil rights were violated or whose lives were taken by police violence, make up the largest category of tort claims against the City, costing taxpayers more than $200 million dollars annually in settlement payouts.
Instead, as Sharkey and others outline, we need to invest that money in preventative approaches and programs – from effective mental health services, to anti-bias education, to supportive housing, to community violence interrupters – and address the root causes of violence. I’ll be looking closely at those investments in the Fiscal Year 2023 budget next month, and advocating for funding effective, evidence-based approaches to combatting violence.
Everyone deserves to feel safe in the city they call home. As we grapple with the real surge in gun violence and hate crimes, we must ensure that our strategies reduce rather than accelerate violence.
Together, we mourn for Michelle, Kristal, Jason, and Wilbert, and we rededicate ourselves to ensuring that our city is a safe place for all New Yorkers to thrive.
Take care of yourself, and each other,
Brad
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