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NYPD and city officials are more than a year late with a mandatory gun smuggling report
By
Samantha Max
Published Sep 29, 2023
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images
By
Samantha Max
Published Sep 29, 2023
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City councilmembers say a mandatory annual report on how illegal guns are brought into the city is nearly a year overdue — hindering their ability to make decisions on how best to prevent gun trafficking.
The report, which the NYPD and the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice are required to produce, would include details about each firearm that police have seized in the last year, including the types of guns recovered, whether they were connected to crimes, where they came from, where they were recovered and whether they were registered.
The report is also required to include information about how guns are illegally transported into New York City and recommendations for how to prevent firearm trafficking in the future.
Councilmember Shaun Abreu, who sponsored the bill that requires the new annual reports, said the report is needed to focus on the places where illegal guns are entering the city, and find ways to stop them.
“By encouraging interagency cooperation and helping law enforcement better understand where guns are coming from, we can stop these guns from getting in the hands of criminals,” he said in a statement. “But first, we need the report.”
City councilmembers voted to approve the bill requiring the annual reports last September with near-unanimous support, and Mayor Eric Adams signed the bill into law in mid-October. At a bill signing in Times Square, the mayor said the measure would help to dam the rivers that feed gun violence.
“We are fighting back against illegal guns coming into our city,” Adams proudly announced.
The first report was supposed to be submitted about two months later, on Dec. 1, 2022. But that deadline has been pushed back repeatedly, and the report is still not complete.
A spokesperson from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice told Gothamist several weeks ago that the agency planned to publish the report in September. As the month draws to a close, the release has been postponed again. The spokesperson did not respond to repeated requests for a new publication date, but said the agency is “actively collaborating” with the NYPD, the mayor’s office and the deputy mayor of public safety to produce a “comprehensive report.”
Data on firearms is notoriously difficult to find because of federal laws that restrict the gathering and sharing of such information. But the numbers that are available show that many illegal firearms make their way to New York City through what’s often called the Iron Pipeline, a common trafficking route along Interstate 95, which also passes through states south of New York that have looser gun laws.
Of the 8,158 firearms recovered in New York state that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive traced in 2022 with a known origin, just 1,538 — or about 1 in 5 — came from inside New York. According to ATF data, the other most common states the guns came from were Georgia, Virginia, Florida, South Carolina and Pennsylvania.
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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
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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