The Root Causes of Gun Violence

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. The gun violence of the racist mass shooting in Buffalo is in the news, and so is the gun violence that takes lives individually in New York City. At a news conference yesterday, Mayor Adams rolled out a pilot program using a technology that the reporters in attendance needed to pass through on their way in.

Mayor Adams: When you came in today, those are not metal detectors. Sometimes people get them mixed up. Those are not metal detectors, they detect guns. That is what they detect. Many of you remember my good friend, former colleague in the police department, James E. Davis was shot with a 9-millimeter because someone brought a gun inside the building. We're going after guns and that's what those devices are. It's a pilot project.

Brian Lehrer: The technology could be used at subway stations and other places if the pilot program passes the mayor's muster. It's controversial with skeptics of who that technology might entrap or people concerned about who that technology might entrap in the criminal justice system without having committed a crime. On one of our shows last week, we had Daily News columnist, Harry Siegel, who talked about how the debate over bail reform is too narrowly focusing on one piece of a larger picture, which the mayor describes as only around 700 people.

The larger picture, 700 people in our city of 8 million, doing most of the shooting. Harry Siegel said, "Leaders of the NYPD are skeptical of the current justice system's ability to keep those 700 off the street."

Harry Siegel: They're skeptical that there's all that much space to turn things around, not because of bail reform, it became the symbol over the red herring, I would say, of this fight, but because of a broader justice system that really isn't equipped to remove from circulation often by incarcerating the relatively small number of New Yorkers who are consistently involved in shootings, either because they're shooting someone or because they're getting shot. What I keep hearing is if those people recirculate--

Brian Lehrer: Daily News columnist, Harry Siegel here last week. Now we'll get another view from Anthonine Pierre, executive director of the advocacy group, The Brooklyn Movement Center. She has her own Daily News op-ed called What Mayor Adams Gets Right and Wrong About Gun Violence. The center also has a new report called Invest in Black Futures: A Public Health Roadmap for Safe New York City Neighborhoods. Thanks for coming on, Anthonine. Welcome back to WNYC.

Anthonine Pierre: Thanks for having me, Brian. Love your show.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Your Daily News op-ed begins with the fact that you're old enough to remember the 1990s violence crisis in New York City and acknowledges we are now in a new violence crisis. Being an advocate for less emphasis on the police, and we'll get into some of what you're for in the new report, what's your take on how the violence crisis of the 1990s came to as much of an end as it did?

Anthonine Pierre: Absolutely. In the '90s, our mayor, Mayor Giuliani, he really instituted all of these policies, really instituting broken windows policing throughout New York City. What happened in the '90s is that the people who needed resources and were enacting violence in communities because they needed resources were then just warehoused and routed into incarceration. What we're seeing now is that the children of people who were locked up in the '90s are now stuck in the same violent crisis and we're trying to answer the crisis in the same way with more police, but we've got the data that that didn't work that time.

Brian Lehrer: What did work that time if it wasn't just policing because you're almost making an argument that policing did work that time, at least to take down crime, but it had this horrible side effect of mass incarceration.

Anthonine Pierre: Absolutely. I think when we're talking about taking down crime and we're talking about getting to what Eric Adams talks about, getting to the root causes of gun violence. If we're treating the problem of crime with this knee-jerk reaction of policing, then what we're not doing is we're not treating the houselessness, we're not treating the mental health issues, we're not treating the substance use issues.

What is happening is that, yes, you can lock folks up and they'll leave your communities. You literally sever the people from community who are causing harm and violence, but they don't disappear, they're always going to come back. The only way to actually make sure that a future generation of New Yorkers is not in the same violence crisis is to make sure that we are getting in at that root, that we are providing the resources, that we are making the room for the transformation that incarceration says that it does but in fact, it really just sends folks back home with lots more problems.

Brian Lehrer: On the Harry Siegel conversation, which you told us you heard and wanted to continue the conversation from, do you think getting those 700 people off the street, if that's even the right number, who allegedly are ramping up the violence, and a longer-term investment in equality, strategy for fighting crime and injustice, as you're advocating, are compatible? Can both things happen at the same time or do you have to oppose one to achieve the other, as you see it?

Anthonine Pierre: One thing we need to really understand is that this crisis, this violence crisis that we're in, it is a public health crisis. What we're seeing, this crime that we're seeing, it is the impact of concurrent crises of policing, of incarceration, and of gun violence. These are the vibes in our neighborhoods, this is what we are experiencing. If we want to actually be able to undermine those things, we're going to need to bring in those resources, we're going to need to treat this as a public health issue.

What happens is when we bring in policing, that's a public safety solution. We want to make sure that public health is not just being used as the rhetoric, it's not just being used because it sounds nice, but that we actually think like public health researchers and public health professionals and we say, "Well, if violence is a problem," in the public health world, that's a contagion, and so we want to think

about, "Well, how do we contain gun violence?"

That means that we're going to have to, one, we're going to have to bring in the crisis intervention programs that are actually doing the work, that are going to stop the violence right now. Then we also, at the same time, yes, we have to bring in the housing. When we see these encampments being broken up by police, what happens to those people? Where do they go? We've already seen numbers that very few of them go into the shelter system because it's so unsafe.

These things do need to be happening at the same time, the public safety response to social service issues. We've talked about this time and time again, and even NYPD top brass has said that they are not the best folks to be doing this kind of work. If we can stop this, if we can contain gun violence now, then we can also look to the next generation. We can look to 30 years from now and say, "What do we want our communities to look like? What resources do we need to give people now so that they can grow into, that we can all grow into a safe New York?"

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we're going to give you the chance to answer that question. What resources should be invested into what communities now to give all New Yorkers a chance to grow into a more crime-free city in 30 years? It's 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Without the cycles of poverty, which continue to be so persistent in New York and in America, that lead periodically to outbreaks of gun violence. 212-433-WNYC. 433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer for Anthonine Pierre from The Brooklyn Movement Center. The Daily News op-ed that you wrote is called What Mayor Adams Gets Right and Gets Wrong About Gun Violence. What do you think he's getting right?

Anthonine Pierre: He's getting that public health narrative right. There's so many clips of the mayor talking about gun violence as a public health problem and we are so happy that the work that we've been doing to talk about these public health issues, to talk about how Black lives are being prematurely cut short because of lack of resources, we're so happy that that is happening.

We need the public health piece to be not a talking point, but we need funding to go behind it. We live in a capitalist society. Show me the money if you're really honest about public health as the way that we're viewing these current violence issues we're in.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a position on these gun detectors that the mayor says are not metal detectors but more specific to guns?

Anthonine Pierre: Absolutely. Look, we are in this place where we're in this conversation about police accountability, where our mayor is talking a lot about nicer policing strategies, more safe policing strategies. At the end of the day, what people actually need are resources. These metal detectors, they're being piloted in hospitals and in schools, so we're looking at the people who are the most vulnerable, who lack the most resources. We see the policing that's being brought in, we see the vision around policing.

What we're not seeing is the vision around ending the structural violence that plagues Black and brown neighborhoods, the lack of historic disinvestment when we talk about generational wealth. If we're not treating these issues, then all we're doing is creating more funding lines for the NYPD.

Brian Lehrer: It gets back to the both and question though, right? Can the mayor be investing in long-term public health strategies as you describe them, and make good on his rhetoric about that at the same time as doing something like putting technologies in places that are vulnerable to gun violence, as well as having vulnerable people, without that working against the longer-term cause?

Anthonine Pierre: It's not possible, in part, because one of the findings of our report really is that policing, in and of itself, is a public health crisis. You have a mayor who's talking about gun violence as a public health crisis and is solving these issues with policing, but then what we're not seeing is the alignment with groups like The American Public Health Association that are clear that violence is a public health crisis, and that police violence is a public health crisis.

We've got a mayor who has in the past said that he was a whistleblower, that he's done a lot of this work around reform, but the work is still to be done because our folks, when something unsafe happens, when something bad happens, when there's harm and there's violence in our communities, we don't know who to call because we know that calling the police brings also the threat of police violence. Just logically, it seems impossible to be able to advance a public health strategy around violence that includes police.

Brian Lehrer: That includes police at all? Are you a police abolitionist? [silence] Did you hear the question? Did we lose Anthonine? Did we lose me? Oh, I'm here, okay, but we lost Anthonine. Listeners, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 if you want to get in on this conversation, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Meantime, here's the mayor from his news conference yesterday, again, mentioning some of the other things that he's doing too, as he discussed with state legislators in Albany the other day.

Mayor Adams: There were some unbelievable ideas that came out of this body, they will help us in getting information out to their constituency, such as earned income tax credit, child care, domestic violence, shelters, education, dealing with crime.

Brian Lehrer: We have Anthonine back. Based on that clip, is the mayor on the way to the right kind of mix with those things plus other things he talks about like 100,000 new summer jobs this summer? Then I'll come back to what you said about can't do this with police and how far you take that.

Anthonine Pierre: Absolutely. We have been calling for funding going into these resources for a couple of years now. We need to move money in the budget into these places. SYEP has been one of the most top-line demands here.

Brian Lehrer: That's the Summer Youth Employment Program, SYEP. Go ahead.

Anthonine Pierre: Yes. It's really great that the mayor is listening to communities

and is moving in that direction. I think where there is so much deep concern is, are we tokenizing the bringing in of resources? Are the resources a talking point? Because when we look at the budget, what we see is an increase in $182 million in the NYPD budget. We don't see those kinds of increases, we don't see the kind of energy and the fervor.

What we hear from Mayor Adams, even today, we hear on a fairly daily basis that crime, crime, crime is the problem. BMC, the Brooklyn Movement Center, we are a member based organization. When we're in conversations with our folks, what we're hearing is housing is the problem, that people are getting pushed out of their houses, that people are spending over 50% of their income on housing, and that's not being addressed, that's not being raised as a crisis in the same way that the fear mongering is happening around crime.

Brian Lehrer: To what you were saying just before your audio cut out for a minute. I heard you to say that they can't come up with longer-term solutions that include the police. How far do you go with that?

Anthonine Pierre: Yes. Look, when we look, again, at communities where there is violence happening and people want it to end, and they have a hesitation around calling the police, that should let us know that the police cannot be the answer here, and that what we need to be doing is really thinking about what does safety actually look like? What are the ways that we keep each other safe? I think about instances like Eric Garner being killed as being a part of the community, a person who would break up fights between young people. I think what we're looking for is, how do we actually bring in the kind of transformative justice resources that actually move and create more safety in the community?

I have to say, the levels of distrust that folks have with the NYPD really shows that their reliance on the NYPD is out of a scarcity, out of a lack of anything else. Then when we've done work around street harassment and gender based violence, when we've had these conversations with people in the street about how they want to feel safe, the police is not their first answer. They turn to their neighbors, you text your friends when you get home. There's a way that we can be more engaged as communities in keeping ourselves safe. We need to develop these alternatives so that as we think about policing, we can be more clear about what policing actually serves in our society and what the needs actually are.

Brian Lehrer: Sharon in Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sharon.

Sharon: Hi, good morning, Brian, love your show. This is very timely, I am a former educator, I live in Harlem. We are currently-- a program [unintelligible 00:17:18] My School Votes. It's recruiting young people to think about voting. If they're too young to vote, they can register at 17 and they can get to vote. The real piece about this is that we are looking at intervention in our schools, in our high schools and our young people.

Yesterday, I was just telling your screener that we had an opportunity to invite to a

high school and to talk to young people about voting, but even more importantly, how they see their community. One of the things that came up in that discussion was that they didn't feel empowered in their community. There's a lot of heavy policing going on, as you know, with our new mayor to deter violence, but it's really heightening the mental state of our young people. Not that they're going crazy, but they want to have a sense of hope. One of the things that we're doing through this program, My School Votes, is that we really get and talk to our young people about how they see their community, how they can envision their community.

We have gotten together with one of our council people who is going to give us space where we can meet with our young people, bring families in and talk about how they re-envision this community, and then giving them the tools to do so. We also know that many of them have lost loved ones through COVID, so you now have that mental duress that's going on also. We are really reaching out to our young people and it's going to have to happen at a grassroot level, the community has to do this work.

Mayor Adams, I know he's a police officer, he has that mentality, but we really need to have a mental health support, because we are in a mental health crisis. The policing is a crisis. That over policing, that doesn't give the young people a chance to say, "I can do something about this, I'm empowered to do something about it." We've done outreach in our community along 125th Street, we've talked to the community members who've seen the changes in their community, but they're not comfortable, they're frightened because they see so many police, and there are so many things happening, the gang violence with the guns, which you were talking about earlier, that's real. We just want to give our kids a chance to fight for their community.

Brian Lehrer: How do you think the mayor is doing, Sharon, and city council for that matter, at allocating resources for the mental health crisis and the mental health treatments that you're talking about?

Sharon: I'll be honest with you, Brian, they're not doing enough. They don't see it as a support, and that's one of the things that I'm very-- It's just an area where we really have to tap into that. As far as the money, yes, I talked to one of our city council persons the other day and told them, I said, "Look, you got to budget. You got to allocate money for mental health services for young people. It has to be--" She's one of the newer council persons that is running but we also know we are holding everybody's feet to the fire and we're fighting for our young--

Brian Lehrer: Sharon, thank you so much for your call. Yes, mental health is one of the things that the mayor talks about the most, Anthonine, I wonder if you see the resources flowing from his budget, or for that matter, from the city council's budget. We have this presumably more progressive than ever city council, more people of color than ever, majority female for the first time. What's city council doing relative to the mayor on the mental health resources front if you look at it at that granular level?

Anthonine Pierre: Yes, what we're seeing and folks have seen that in the mayor's executive budget that was released late last month, that he put in $55 million for mental health programming. Again, that pales in comparison to the $182 million that

we see going into NYPD and the program, this B-HEARD program, there are a lot of questions around this program.

It's a pilot that started less than a year ago. There are a lot of questions about the results and the resources. Where we really want to be is holding that 55 million and getting even more for our communities when it comes to mental health because we've been in this pandemic now for over two years. There isn't a person, I believe, on this earth who hasn't had some deep mental health impacts coming out of the pandemic. In this budget year, when we actually, this is not an austerity budget, but it is being organized like one.

This is actually the year where we need to see recovery. We need to see resources coming into mental health. I know that you all have been talking on the show about what's going on in Buffalo. Our Invest In Black Futures report, everything that we talk about in terms of the health impacts to Black folks here in New York city, when you look at the numbers, they're similar across big cities.

When you look at Buffalo, what we have is a Black community that was already under siege in terms of not getting resources that it needs from its city, county, and state elected officials. Then on top of that, we've had this white supremacist attack. Again, folks who maybe are super down state like me, always lived in Brooklyn, you may not realize that Buffalo is a rust belt town. There's nothing more American than a city like Buffalo. Now, with this white supremacist attack, you've got more mental health issues, but then you've got these concurrent crises where, do people have mental health programming, but do they also have housing? What's the food access looking like?

This is why we work with folks like, I want to shout out Black Love Resistance In The Rust and Felicia Brown for some of the amazing Black-led work that they're doing on the ground here because if we had this kind of attack happening in New York city, it would mushroom all of the other problems that we already see in Black communities. We're literally one tragedy away from all of what's happening with Black New Yorkers just falling apart.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, we have a few more minutes with Anthonine Pierre, executive director of The Brooklyn Movement Center. She has a Daily News op-ed called What Mayor Adams Gets Right and Wrong About Gun Violence and Angela in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Angela.

Angela: Hi. How are you doing? Oh my gosh. Quickly as I was telling the screener, I agree with both women, the guests. I would like to add, one, the police, to me, should be more involved on the ground with the kids, some kind of big brother program so that they can see the police officers in a different light. The other point that I wanted to bring up is some children in these communities that are underserved, they have relatives that are police officers. They know that their relatives are good, decent police officers.

To hear some of the derogatory things that are being said about someone in their

family, we can't lose sight of that. Let's think about those children and those families, but also let's have some preventative measures. Like I'm just driving down, I know Brooklyn, Brian, Vanderbilt Avenue right off of the-- I just hit Atlantic Avenue. When I look at-- as that neighborhood has changed, all of the beautiful, wonderful exercise and this, it just looks beautiful.

Then I think about Utica Avenue and Crown Heights, there are some things that's going on there, but you get to know that the appearance of the community is about to change when you see these cute, lovely, wonderful things go up ahead of time. Our community needs to have more, we need to have more, we need to be proactive, not reactive. These kids, they need places to go. Brian, I'm a retired teacher, and they need to be involved. The mental health, oh my gosh, we definitely need more mental health.

It should be-- I think I saw something online where they had asked a question, should our mindset awareness be something, a class, as mandatory-- part of the requirements? We need to have those things that's not just buzzwords every time the DOE changes. We have all these new things to do. There are some things that consistently need to be addressed with these children on a regular basis. When I asked in my school about having a program for children who suffered a loss of COVID, we have to be careful about labeling these children.

I don't know, but we need to address the mental health issues free in a public school level, consistently, not the psychologist being there maybe once a week and having all of these cases, the children are at risk in the school, 31 years teaching middle school, I see that the parents need help. Oh my gosh, it's a lot going on. Let's be proactive, not reactive. There's definitely places where we can put that money.

Some of these people that come in that raise the rate of the risk so that we can no longer afford to put in the neighborhood, they should be obligated, I'm sorry, to give to the community, to guarantee whatever, if you are going to benefit off of these expensive apartments that may be less in Manhattan, but can suit your needs or whatever, and then put something that can benefit the community free, not raising the prices of everything. We're not thinking about taking care of one another. I could go on and on and on, because this is all [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Angela, with all of that, and you make so many good points, how do you think Mayor Adams is doing, and for that matter, city council, if you pay attention at that level, in this new term?

Angela: Well, Mayor Adams, I think I did, and it's funny because I was trying to recall, I heard him address either after school program or housing. I think his thing is housing. Let's see what he's going to do, who are the people that he has around him. To be honest, I have things going on. I'm not really looking at the city council, but I will now, once you mentioned majority women, people of color, I definitely will look now and pay attention and see what needs to be done and give some suggestions, that you have the wrong people asking questions and saying things. That's like me being in a DOE, you have people who are administrators and never been in the classroom that want to tell teachers what to do.

You have politicians that maybe have not lived in the neighborhood and they want to give suggestions of what they think people in the neighborhood need. I'm sorry I don't remember the young lady's name. She said, "People have to be a part of the conversation." The second woman who spoke, you have to allow the people you're trying to serve to be a part of the conversation. Don't come in and say, "This is what we're going to do." Listen to everybody. The ones who aren't doing well, you really need to listen to them. The students who are suffering, the families who are in crisis, the kids who are in and out of juvenile, ask them. Those are the ones you really need to listen to. They will tell you where [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much, Angela. We really appreciate it.

Angela: Thank you for letting me go on and on and on. I appreciate you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: You're good to listen. Anthonine, as we wrap up the segment, get really specific, if you can, because here we are in budget season, the mayor and the council are discussing and debating and negotiating over exactly these kinds of things. How much are they going to put in before the new fiscal year starts in July and they need to wrap up all the numbers into mental health, into housing, into these longer-term things, in addition to the police, which we know are going to be funded, are there specific bills or programs that you want to wrap this up by saying, "Hey, city council and mayor Adams, do this one now and do it big"? One or two.

Anthonine Pierre: Yes, absolutely. Look, when we talk about, B-HEARD and we talk about the 55 million that's currently pledged in the executive budget for mental health programming, what we're not talking about is the fact that New York state is about to go through an implementation of 988, which will be a new mental health phone number, emergency phone number like 911, but it'll be 988. This is a statewide implementation that's happening. What we want to see is that implementation really carry the emergency responses that we need. We want to see the collaboration between the city and state. We really just want to make sure that we're getting programming.

In particular, there are these mobile crisis units that run out of several hospitals. I think what is so awesome about mobile crisis teams is that these are people who understand how to work around mental health, they understand de-escalation, they come in under two hours, and they're in your community, they're people who look like you, they're people who speak your language. That is, when you're calling a mobile crisis team, you're not calling the cops, you're calling a mobile crisis team.

I think with B-HEARD, it's not always clear who is going to come when you make that call. We really need the council to, one, make sure that everything that we're doing around mental health is actually folded into a statewide 988 implementation. Two, that the resources at the ground level are actual resources that folks can actually use around mental health.

Brian Lehrer: Anthonine Pierre, executive director of the Brooklyn Movement Center. She has a Daily News op-ed called What Mayor Adams Gets Right and

Wrong About Gun Violence. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for coming back on the show.

Anthonine Pierre: Thanks so much, Brian. Great to be here. Definitely, folks, look at our Invest In Black Futures report.

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