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July 4th Is Long Gone, But Illegal Fireworks Are Still Keeping Some NYers Up At Night
By
Ben Yakas
Published Jul 22, 2020
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Jul 22, 2020
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The late spring and early summer, the city was inundated with illegal fireworks exploding at all times of day, with fireworks complaints in the month of June 426 times higher than the same period in 2019. On June 23rd, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a task force with a team of NYPD, FDNY, and Sheriff's Bureau officials to "disrupt supply chains" and deal with escalating complaints. It is now almost exactly a month later, and officials announced the results of that campaign so far: they have made 127 arrests and confiscated two shipping containers worth of fireworks.
“We haven’t been focusing on fireworks going off in the streets but rather interdicting the amount of fireworks coming into the city,” NYC Sheriff Joseph Fucito said during a press briefing on Tuesday. “The amount of fireworks that we’ve seized since we started the project has been about two shipping containers full, a pretty significant amount."
Most of the 127 arrests have been of people who were stopped at the NY state border while allegedly trafficking large quantities of fireworks from Pennsylvania and other states. They have all been charged with multiple counts of possession of illegal fireworks.
On the surface, it may not seem like there's still a need for such a task force: the July 4th weekend, the peak of fireworks season, has come and gone, and anecdotally, the news cycle has moved onto other more pressing topics during the pandemic.
But that of course doesn't mean that the random fireworks have completely ceased, nor that people are not still annoyed by them. Here's a small selection of what people have been saying on Twitter:
From January 1st to June 21st, there were 11,535 calls to 311 about fireworks; over the same time period in 2019, there were 54 such calls. Since the task force started on June 23rd, there were a whopping 33,157 calls to 311 about fireworks; the peak came, unsurprisingly, on July 4th, with over 6,000 calls that day alone. In comparison, there were 705 fireworks calls to 311 in 2019 during that same period, and just 263 on July 4th that year.
You can see the day-by-day fireworks complaints to 311 this summer in the chart below by clicking and dragging the chart to the right.
If you only look at the calls after July 5th, the numbers are still historically high: there were 2,793 calls made about fireworks between July 6th and July 20th, compared with 132 calls in 2019 during that same period. You can see which parts of the city the calls are coming from in the map below.
And there's been at least one deadly incident involving illegal fireworks in recent weeks as well: a 33-year-old woman was fatally shot after asking a man in her neighborhood to stop setting off fireworks on July 7th. Shatavia Walls and Kelvin Hernandez were shot at the Pink Houses in East New York that night, and Walls died of her injuries this past Friday.
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sheriff's office
fireworks
Illegal fireworks
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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