NYC's Gun Violence Hot Spots

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Matt Katz: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz, reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist Newsroom, and I'm filling in for Brian today. Now, let's take a look at the state of gun violence in New York City. While skimming the headlines, you've surely seen countless stories about shooting, stabbings, random violent crimes that are shocking to read. During the show, we've spoken to so many of you who've expressed feeling like the city is lawless, comparing it to the '70s or early '90s, but is New York City really as dangerous as it seems.

Our colleague, WNYC and Gothamist breaking news reporter Brittany Kriegstein, she focuses on crime and gun violence, and she goes to the scene of so many of these fatal gun shootings. Today, she's coming to us with a bird's eye view of the truth about gun violence in New York City. She was able to parse this data and come up with some really compelling conclusions according to her reporting and a map created alongside it that I encourage everyone to go to gothamist.com and check out.

The majority of shootings over the last 4 years have been centralized in only 4% of our city's 120,000 blocks. Brittany joins us now to delve into our findings and the broader picture of public safety here in New York. Hey, Brittany, thanks for coming on, and thanks for this amazing reporting.

Brittany Kriegstein: Thanks so much for having me, Matt.

Matt Katz: You found that 4% of the 120,000 blocks count for almost all of the gun violence that we see. Then, there's nine blocks that are the worst hotspots. These have had 10 or more shootings over the past four years. I think the real question that people probably have is where are they? Where are these places? Then we'll get into the why.

Brittany Kriegstein: Sure. We found that actually a large majority of these hotspots are concentrated in Brooklyn, actually Crown Heights and Brownsville. Then, there's one of those hotspots in Red Hook. There's one in Queens right near the East River. There's another one in East Harlem and a final one in the central Bronx area.

Matt Katz: I'm curious if there are listeners who live in those neighborhoods. Are you unfortunately too aware of this? What is the story behind the sensational local news headlines? What are the root causes of the violence between your neighbors? We hope listeners might give us a call, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Did you even know that there's gun violence in your area? We learned from Brittany's reporting, and we'll talk about this, that sometimes people around the corner from these hot spots aren't aware that there's so much violence going on, just a block or two down.

We can also take your questions about how Brittany Kriegstein did this work. Give us a call, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Brittany, your piece comes along with a map of the city showing where all the shootings happened from the years 2020 to 2024. Is there a reason you chose those particular years to focus on?

Brittany Kriegstein: Yes, definitely. We know that obviously 2020 was the beginning of the pandemic, and we focused on those years specifically because that's when we saw shootings start to spike in New York City right after the pandemic and truthfully nationwide. Studying those years shows us where that spike happened, where those patterns went, and now as shootings are on the decline, obviously in New York as we're going to talk about, where are those patterns headed? That's why we chose that snapshot, those four years.

Matt Katz: When I sometimes do some public safety reporting and go to the NYPD's CompStat website, did you start there? This is the data that the NYPD puts up on a whole range of stuff, although it's not necessarily complete or doesn't have everything you're always looking for. Is that where you began your research?

Brittany Kriegstein: Yes, we did. We took a look at CompStat. The thing with CompStat is it's hard to find those historical numbers. You can see year-to-date, you can see where things are, let's say, this year rather compared with last year, but you can't really get that historical context from the last few years. The NYPD actually has another open data portal where they input these incidents in a much more detailed way. You've got information about victims. You've got really precise location data. You've got whether or not that shooting was fatal or non-fatal, who was wounded, et cetera.

We actually chose that data set because it's just far more comprehensive. CompStat is a great resource if you're just taking a quick look but it doesn't have all the detail that we wanted for this project. Importantly for me, I felt it doesn't distinguish between fatal and non-fatal shootings. It's hard to see that human toll of gun violence.

Matt Katz: I know you worked on this, and I should mention with Gothamist data reporter Jaclyn Jeffrey Wilensky, who helped you crunch these numbers. You also worked with criminology experts from CUNY's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. What did they add to your reporting?

Brittany Kriegstein: Jaclyn was incredibly helpful with her data and mapping skills, and we were so grateful to have that partnership and be able to take a look at this together. Professors from John Jay, that would be Christopher Herrmann and Fritz Umbach, they've been doing this work for years. Really, they've walked these blocks. They've talked to people for the last 10 years and more.

They really had a lens through which we could look at this data and do this work, and they helped us avoid some of the pitfalls in the data. Sometimes they explained to us that the incidents aren't geocoded to the exact spots where they occurred. They were just tremendously helpful also in helping us focus in what kind of story can we tell here. They were the ones who really stressed to us exactly how concentrated these shootings have been in the last couple of years. They were just tremendously helpful resources and continue to be frankly.

Matt Katz: Then you went out to some of these hotspots, these places that have seen 10 or more shootings through the years. You report on shootings all the time, and you go out to the scenes of these crimes. What did you find when you went out to these hotspots when you started talking to neighbors, talking to people who live there, and seeing what's out there and what residential, commercial, what'd you find?

Brittany Kriegstein: Definitely. I feel like physically going to these places is crucial. You hear from people in their own words what they experience every day. I met some incredibly kind and very well-spoken people who really had a pretty comprehensive idea of what was going on on their blocks. They leave for work every day, they come home, and they are concerned. They do hear gunshots. They were very helpful, obviously in giving us a full picture.

The situation most of these blocks were fairly residential. One feature that we commonly identified was that they're places where a lot of people tend to live, and then there are places where there's an open space where people can gather, maybe a courtyard, a park, or maybe a place that sells food late into the night. I know we'll talk more about this, but that was the picture that we got. Talking to people was crucial for this project, talking to as many people as possible.

Matt Katz: Then, would you walk a couple of blocks away and talk to neighbors there to see if they were aware of what might have been happening around the corner?

Brittany Kriegstein: Totally. That was one of the most important things besides focusing on the hotspots going nearby, because overwhelmingly, what we heard from people who lived even one, two blocks away, three blocks away is gun violence. No, this is a safe block. We don't have a lot of that over here, which was stark because we knew what the data was. We knew how bad some of these places were, but just a couple of blocks away was such a different picture. I think that really emphasizes this point that there are really just some concentrated blocks that we're talking about here, and the rest of many of these neighborhoods are really quite safe.

Matt Katz: Brittany, let's go to Sterling Place in Crown Heights. You visited this stretch, I guess, several times. Tell us about this location.

Brittany Kriegstein: Sure. I had been to that location. It's just basically an avenue block between Rochester and Buffalo Avenues and Crown Heights. I'd been there multiple times. As you mentioned, I covered these incidents almost daily, and I had frequented that specific segment. I already had this context in my own head of things that had happened there, people who had been killed in the last four years. That was one of the hotspots as our data showed. I went there just to get a picture and talk to residents, talk to neighbors, and look out for markers of this violence. Immediately when I got to that block, there were candles set up for one of the victims. There were people who knew they could tell you chronologically this person was shot, that this person was shot ,and then I grew up with this person who was also shot. That was really telling, obviously. We just kept talking to as many people as we could from there and met some folks who knew any of these victims very personally.

Matt Katz: You met the mother of Tyquan Howard.

Brittany Kriegstein: That's exactly right. Tyquan was 16 when he was shot and killed right around the corner from Sterling Place. This was May of 2020, and his mom was telling me how he collapsed on the block not far from their apartment building. She doesn't even live there anymore. She's moved away but she was just talking about how difficult it is to come back and visit and was pointing out some of the places where other people have also been shot and injured or killed. She had a lot to say about why she thinks that this particular block has so many issues.

Matt Katz: What is the reason that she cites?

Brittany Kriegstein: She feels like that stretch of Sterling is involved in somewhat of a feud with residents a couple of blocks away at the Albany houses. That's one reason. Another reason she feels is because it is like we mentioned. It's a concentrated block. There is some public housing complexes there which may explain part of the feud with the people in Albany houses, but it's a concentrated block where a lot of the buildings have these open central courtyards. I went there myself. Some of those gates to those courtyards don't lock. What you have is a lot of people gathering there late at night and you have a lot of these tensions that we talk about.

There's definitely a lack of resources neighbors were saying in terms of things for kids to do late at night or after school. There aren't as many maybe community centers as they would like to see and there's housing stress, there's poverty, there's just a lot of factors mixing there. It's so complex but that's what Tyquan's Mother [unintelligible 00:12:31] was getting at, that there's a lot missing here for people to do and at the same time, there are places that bring them together sometimes late at night with people they may not know visiting the block and that exacerbates these issues.

Matt Katz: Yet a couple of blocks away there's a different reality, at least for some people. You met neighbors who were saying that they thought that their area was pretty safe and quiet.

Brittany Kriegstein: Exactly. Literally two blocks away took me about five minutes to walk. Right across Utica Avenue, I was still on Sterling Place and I was talking to two older women who were sitting outside having Chinese food for lunch and telling me that this is a very safe block. They said, "Gun violence, yes, it happens over there," and they pointed to the other part of Sterling that I had just been on. They said, "This is a very safe block. We stay out. We sit out late at night here, and we hang out and we don't feel unsafe." Whereas the residents on the other part of Sterling, which has all of those incidents, were saying that they felt nervous to be outside late, that they would just quickly come and go from home. One woman even told me she doesn't let her family visit her in one of those buildings with the open courtyards.

Matt Katz: Fascinating. We have some callers who have some questions about your reporting, Brittany. George in Washington Heights. Hi, George. Thanks for calling into The Brian Lehrer Show.

George: Hi. Thank you. For those of us who are not familiar with the actual geographic location, if she could present a more nuanced view. For example, what would we see? Is it socio-economically? Is it residential or mostly commercial? As far as the demographic age, a lot of retirees, old people are not. I guess ethnicity would be part of it and culture. What are these areas like? If they're juxtaposed one safe to the other unsafe, what is the difference? CompStat doesn't give us that, and she can fill us in so we can visualize it. Geographically knowing the streets and everything doesn't do much good for us but we appreciate it.

Matt Katz: Fair enough, George. Thanks.

George: I'd like to hear about that.

Matt Katz: That's a really interesting question. Thanks a lot. Brittany, what can you tell us about first, on the demographics of the victims here of the neighborhoods here?

Brittany Kriegstein: Sure. I want to preface this by saying that gun violence is incredibly complex. Every expert we talked to always said that there are so many factors at play here. One of the things we did notice about most of those hotspots is yes, they're residential. Sometimes there are some commercial buildings thrown in, for example, late-night delis. If you've got this heavily populated street and there's a deli nearby where people can gather late at night to get food maybe after they're drinking or they're out partying or something like that, that really can exacerbate some of these incidents, and not always cause but sometimes fuel some of this silence.

In terms of socioeconomic, these are underserved areas, often people of color, places that have been overlooked for a long time. One of the things I'll emphasize though is that they're usually not places where there are a lot of vacant buildings or abandoned lots. That was overwhelmingly not what we found. We found places that are actually quite busy and vibrant, but places where, like I said maybe there haven't been those resources socioeconomically, maybe it's places where people are stressed about being priced out of housing. I know that that can be the case in some of the places in Crown Heights that we are talking about. It's really that combination of factors and we're still, frankly, trying to get to the bottom of exactly what makes all of these places so similar and so prime for these incidents to keep on happening.

Matt Katz: Because Brittany, if you were to drive by one of these corners that has had 10 shootings or 10 deadly shootings in the last 2 or 3 or 4 years, you wouldn't necessarily know that by just looking at the corner. It just looks like any other city block in a particular neighborhood, I imagine.

Brittany Kriegstein: Exactly. You really wouldn't know that and that's part of what's so complicated and difficult about parsing all of this out. There's no one indicator. It's just such a big combination of factors that you have to really explore and dive into.

Matt Katz: Gregory, in the Bronx. Hi, Gregory. Thanks for calling in. You're on with Brittany Kriegstein.

Gregory: Hey, good morning. Thank you for taking my call.

Matt Katz: Sure.

Gregory: I couldn't resist. I listen to you guys and I'm a rather contrarian so I pretty much disagree with everything I hear on the station, even though I can't help with [unintelligible 00:17:29]

Matt Katz: We like contrarians. That's okay.

Gregory: This one I couldn't resist. I live in the Bronx. I live in what's probably deemed a hotspot. It's in the north area. Relatively speaking, and that's the keyword, relatively speaking, this is a hotspot compared to the rest of the precinct. The precinct, we have two, three blocks that are hot. This is what the police say, and the rest is much less violent, let's say it that way, compared to our blocks but it's everywhere. I find it to be very misleading reporting the concentration of just 4%. It's everywhere. A lot of it doesn't get reported. A lot of it does not make the headlines.

Things that might perhaps get reported to the police does not make the headlines but like in my neighborhood, I've seen shootings. I've seen a lot. Things I wouldn't even want to commit myself to saying on the radio but you go south of here from Norwood to the Fordham in Kingsbridge area, and you see that regularly on the news. You go a little to the east of here along White Plains road on Gun Hill, there's things there. People carry guns. This neighborhood is full of guns. Everybody knows it. The residents know it. The police themselves know it.

They've said it, but guns are portable and they're carried everywhere. Now I'm online, but I was working in the Longwood area, that's by Hunts Point and that was a shooting gallery. I felt like the duck in the shooting gallery was trying to avoid the shootouts, literally, and I hate that word. It's bad and I feel like this is a distortion. It's a push to underrepresent the actual crime since the new political establishment has taken over in the state with the softening of the laws, the softening of the bail reform, defund the cops, mass incarceration laws, that's just given so much empowerment. It's emboldened these people. I'll just give you this one thing that I was told. I was telling-

Matt Katz: Sure.

Gregory: -the police about these drug deals next door that were using our building. I was confronting them. I was reporting to the police, I was throwing the drugs away, and they told me that, "I could kill you and I would go to jail for just two, three years, maybe five years, but I come out and you'd still be dead. I could kill your dogs and not one thing would happen to me."

Matt Katz: That's horrible.

Gregory: They told me to think about that.

Matt Katz: That is horrible. I'm sorry to hear that you've experienced that. I'd like to get Brittany to give a little more context here to respond to your take on this. I don't think she was saying that there isn't violence everywhere in the city and that it doesn't happen everywhere in the city, but just by crunching the numbers and seeing where it's concentrated, maybe that's helpful for policymakers to try to address it. Brittany, I'll let you respond to George.

Brittany Kriegstein: Thank you so much for this perspective. I think it is important to, again, have both sides and talk to people who feel the way you do. That you're living in an area where you see things like this happening, what seemingly everywhere. The data that we have it's police incidents. We are going based off of what has been reported and what has been investigated by them. I will say that the shootings that we've reported in this data set are shootings where someone's either been wounded or killed, not just shots fired.

As you're saying, it's possible sure that many of those shots fired incidents do go unreported. 4% of 120,000 blocks in New York City is still going to be over 4,000 blocks. New York is big and there's some neighborhoods where you do see a lot more of this. It's not only one block, it might be a few, but overwhelmingly, Fritz Umbach, he was saying when he was helping us with this data that back in the '70s about one out of three blocks in New York City experienced a violent event in the course of a year. Just think about that, one in three. Think about your own neighborhood.

That's quite stark and a lot different from what we're seeing right now. While I don't say that your experience in your neighborhood is really valid, and we want to hear that from you, we just are also putting a much bigger picture on this citywide.

Matt Katz: That's good context there, Brittany. Appreciate it. In general, it does seem like, is it fair to say that gun violence is more concentrated now than it had been in the past.

Brittany Kriegstein: It appears so. One thing that we talked about was this concept of title pools. This is something that, again, Fritz going, it's basically means that-- [crosstalk]

Matt Katz: Fritz the criminologist that you work with.

Brittany Kriegstein: Yes, exactly. Fritz Umbach, the criminologist from CUNY's John Jay School of Criminal Justice. He would say that crime it's like tidal pools what we're seeing now. As the tide recedes, that violent crime that we saw in the '70s, '80s, '90s receded, there were these places that remained heavily concentrated, and he emphasized that those are kinds of the places that we're seeing now those tidal pools of violence, if you will.

Matt Katz: Anna in Crown Heights. Hi, Anna. Thanks for calling in. You're on with Brittany Kriegstein.

Anna: Hi. Thanks so much for taking my call. I'm actually a researcher and really appreciate this deep dive into data because I do think that as you've been discussing it's easy perception is not always matching up with the data. In terms of prevention, it's really important to start with what we know what's happening. I live in Northwestern Crown Heights in an area, I've been here 15 years, an area that has greatly gentrified in the period of time that I've been here.

There are restaurants with oyster bars and whatnot along Franklin Avenue. Just looking at this map and I've been digging into a little deeper while I've been on hold, there are four fatal shootings in this year within two blocks of my home. Two of which I knew about, one of which happened at 4:00 in the afternoon outside a neighborhood bodega.

I was happy to see as I was doing my deep digging that someone actually was caught for that. For a guy who asked a deli worker to give him a free cigar, and the guy said no, and he came back and shot him in the head at 4:00 in the afternoon when my daughter was walking home from the subway. It's a block away from the Franklin Avenue subway station, which is a really busy subway station. I've lived in the city since 1989 and the "Bad days of violence." I will say I have never-- I'm a white woman. I'm privileged to have mostly lived in "Safe communities." I would say I live in a safe community now, but that's not what these data are suggesting.

I appreciate just the deep dive and really appreciate the complexity of some of this may be after-hour stuff, as was talked about in another area of Crown Heights. Here, something happened in the middle of the afternoon. I know one of the other incidents on Eastern Parkway, I think happened at 11:00 in the morning. It's not like this is a complex issue and I think the only way to be able to tackle it is to really understand the complexity of it.

Matt Katz: And the statistics. Thank you very much. Appreciate that, Anna. Brittany, I have to let you go in a moment, but Anna mentioned time of day. Is there a commonality there? I imagine most of this is happening late night, early morning hours, but did you find fatal shootings throughout 24-hour periods?

Brittany Kriegstein: Yes. It's a really good point you brought up. We actually track when these incidents happen. That's part of our reporting, especially with those fatal shootings. We get the information from police directly in the form of police reports. We're able to see and yes, most shootings do happen between like 10:00 PM and early morning, maybe 2:00 AM. The experts have also emphasized that to us, but there are always outliers, and I'm so sorry to hear about that incident that happened broad daylight. That stuff definitely does happen.

I think just to emphasize overall that this problem is so widespread. It's not just here in New York City, it's around the country. I think to start thinking about, "What are the solutions that we could employ here?" Whether it's more policing in certain places, or more resources in certain places, violence interrupters, organizations that do this work on the ground that talk to people are embedded in these communities, mental health services. It's really, really broad. As that caller was saying, I appreciate that feedback. It is helpful to look and be able to physically see where these things are happening so we can start to get an idea of now what. That's what we're hoping to tackle with the further reporting.

Matt Katz: Listeners, check out Brittany Kriegstein's reporting on this at gothamist.com. Brittany, thank you. You do not have an easy job going out to the scenes of shootings to talk to families of victims and to try to understand what happened, and then big picture, try to understand what's happening. We appreciate it and New Yorkers appreciate it. WNYC appreciates it. Thanks to you and Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky from the newsroom for crunching this data and doing all this reporting. Really appreciate it.

Brittany Kriegstein: It was a big team effort. Thank you so much, Matt.

 

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