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New York City rolls out most detailed plan yet to reduce gun violence

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Samantha Max

Published Aug 1, 2023

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Mayor Adams announces the Blueprint for Community Safety.

 

Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.

By

Samantha Max

Published Aug 1, 2023

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Mayor Eric Adams unveiled a $485 million plan to curb gun violence Monday, including more support for teens who aren’t on track to graduate high school, upgrades to public housing, job training for young people in neighborhoods with high poverty rates and better mental health care in city jails.

The plan also prioritizes funding for six NYPD precincts in the Bronx and Brooklyn that accounted for a quarter of the city’s shooting incidents last year.

Gun Violence Prevention Czar A.T. Mitchell said those neighborhoods would be bumped to the front of the line when they apply for funding for services to prevent shootings.

“The communities that would historically benefit last from our city bank of resources will now be expedited and be the first to be serviced via this plan,” he said at a press conference Monday flanked by Gov. Kathy Hochul and top city officials.

The 51-page Blueprint for Community Safety paints the clearest picture to date of the various initiatives the city is pursuing to curb gun violence, which has been a major policy focus for Adams, a former police captain who campaigned in the midst of a crime spike. It builds on the mayor’s Blueprint to End Gun Violence, which Adams released after he was elected.

The report includes a long list of metrics to gauge whether the city’s anti-gun violence plan seems to be working. But some experts are questioning whether those measures will give the city a true sense of the plan’s effectiveness.

Liz Glazer, former director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, said the plan’s success would depend on its execution.

“Who is tasked with waking up with a stomach ache every morning, thinking only about this?” she said. “How will they execute on this with the relentless discipline that it's going to need? And how will they know what's working and what's not, so they can be nimble and course correct?”

Despite the fanfare of the announcement, many of the programs in the plan are not new. About $42 million of the funding announced Monday — less than 9% — is new, with some coming from state grants, according to data from the mayor’s office. The remaining $443 million had already been set aside.

The precincts that will be prioritized for funding under the plan include:

Those areas also overlap with other data points that signal community need, including higher rates of child poverty, unemployment and admissions to juvenile detention, along with lower median household incomes and high school graduation numbers, compared to citywide averages.

Those areas will create their own neighborhood safety action plans, which Mitchell said would be uniquely tailored to address the needs in those communities. The mayor’s office is also rolling out meetings called “Community CompStat” in those precincts, which will bring together police and community stakeholders to review data and talk about local public safety concerns.

David Caba, executive director of Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence, works to prevent shootings in the 47th Precinct and said additional funding will help his organization to cover more ground in different violent hot spots. He hopes to staff more teams of violence interrupters and launch conflict mediation programs in neighborhood elementary schools.

“There will still be conflicts, there will still be these groups that need our assistance and our help,” he said in an interview. “But we could reduce that drastically if you invest in those resources.”

Challenges of measuring effectiveness

The report includes a list of “key performance indicators,” intended to show whether the plan is working. Those include obvious data points, such as the number of people shot and the rate of assault hospitalizations. But city officials also want to see drops in school absenteeism, shorter waitlists for housing when people are released from jail and more trees planted along city streets.

Researcher Jeffrey Butts said the city should partner with a third-party to monitor and analyze the data in a way that is “systematic and unbiased.”

“As long as the internal people answer to the same boss, it's really hard to deliver bad news,” said Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “The chief executive often hears how great things are going and never hears that there were indicators of things not going that great.”

Even with an impartial research partner, Butts said, the breadth and design of the plan could make it difficult to assess. He said it will be tough to tell whether any one program is actually causing a drop in shootings, with so many being carried out at the same time.

Butts noted that only analyzing neighborhoods with high rates of violence could also skew the metrics, because they’re statistically more likely to drop.

“You don't know whether you created those changes, or you just happened to start measuring them when they were at a high point and subsequently, they went down,” he said. “But you don't know whether you created that decline.”

Butts recommended that the city compare data trends in those high-violence precincts with similar neighborhoods that don’t have the violence prevention programs in place, so that officials can more effectively measure whether the city’s investments actually paid off.

“If you can't make a reasonable argument that your interventions led to the improvement, there are lots of people waiting to take away your budget, cut your programs, go after you politically,” he said. “It's always a contentious area of policy, and you have to be ready to defend your good ideas from detractors.”

Gun violence has been declining since Adams took office last January. Reported shooting incidents are down 27% compared to this time last year, according to NYPD data, following a 17% drop last year.

Homicides are also down more than 11% this year. After a nationwide spike during the pandemic, many cities across the U.S. are experiencing similar reductions in homicides. Experts said those broader crime trends throughout the country could also skew any data tracking the mayor’s plan.

Tagged

new york city

public safety

Samantha Max

Samantha reports on whether New Yorkers feel safe and whether the institutions that are supposed to protect them are working. Before coming to WNYC/Gothamist, she spent three years covering the criminal justice system in Tennessee for Nashville Public Radio. Her reporting on Nashville's police department received multiple awards, including the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize. Samantha was also part of the inaugural class of Report for America, a service journalism program that sends up-and-coming reporters to local newsrooms across the country. She is a Northwestern University grad, a Baltimore native and fluent in Spanish. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal: samanthamaxwnyc.93.

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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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