New York, laboratory to curb armed violence?

With rising crime rates both in New York and in the rest of the United States, President Joe Biden meets this Thursday in the city of skyscrapers with Mayor Eric Adams to discuss the insecurity caused by firearms, an issue sensible for the Democratic Party.

“Gun violence is a public health crisis”, Adams, a former New York police captain, said recently, who came to the mayor’s office of the largest American city with the promise of reducing the violence, triggered in the first month of his term.

More than any of the shocking crimes recorded in January, the death of two officers increased the pressure on the black mayor, who flirted with crime in his youth and who entered the police with the idea of ​​reforming it from within.

“It is our city against the assassins.” snapped Adams, who last week released his “Project to End Gun Violence”, a package of measures of “intervention and prevention” to fight against the proliferation of weapons, many illegal, and crime.

The mayor wants to resurrect the old plainclothes police patrols in the neighborhoods with the highest crime rate -with a majority black and Hispanic population- programs to reinsert 250,000 young people between 16 and 25 years of age who neither study nor work, reform the judicial system, and stop the arrival of weapons from other states.

Under Adams, several reform figures rose to key positions in the city. Among them, the Manhattan prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, who promised a more lax policy with gun carriers, and who in light of the facts should have moderated his message.

The New York police, who came en masse on Friday to say goodbye to Jason Rivera, one of the two police officers killed in Harlem, made it clear whose side they are on.

“I know that you were tired of the laws, especially those of the new prosecutor and I am sure that the whole blue family (because of the color of the police uniform) is also tired.”, said his wife Dominique Luzuriaga at the funeral, cheered by those who stood up.

“Innovative Strategies”

At the national level, the Democratic government of Joe Biden -which due to differences in his party has not managed to get the Senate to approve his project “build back better” for US$ 1.7 billion in social, educational and environmental investment- promotes a “comprehensive strategy” to fight violence and insecurity.

This strategy seeks to inject more money into cities and states, increase the police in the streets, promote violence prevention programs at the community level as well as new laws to combat arms trafficking and try to stop the violence, which worsened in the 2021 with the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 20,000 people died from firearms last year, more than in 2020, when homicides increased by around 30%. The majority of victims continue to be young black men living in low-income communities.

“New York is the perfect place to test innovative violence prevention strategies.” due to the different political and cultural contexts” of its population and neighborhoods, says Jeffrey Butts, professor and researcher at the John Jay Center for Criminal Justice, who sees it as necessary “a diverse approach”, to stop the violence that contemplates the “deterrence, coercion and prevention”.

Gun control

It seems unlikely that Biden will succeed in overcoming the Republicans’ rejection of any type of measure aimed at controlling weapons, in the name of sacrosanct individual freedom.

Adams’s project has received the support of more than 200 businessmen, concerned that the violence will undermine the economic recovery of the Big Apple after two years of devastating pandemic.

But organizations for the defense of human rights warn against the “erosion of rights” from the Adams project, which leaves out “the heart of the problem.

Of the $11 billion in the New York police budget, less than 1% goes to social projects, says MK Kaishian, a lawyer with the Garrison Project, an NGO that defends the rights of prisoners and victims of police action. police.

“We are the country that imprisons the most people in the world and despite this we have a homicide rate that is about five times higher than in the European Union”, it states. “We are a society that fails to invest in people.”