Solved with soldiers with rifles on the street. Our problem is going to be solved with, when youre making gun arrests, if 40 of the people arrested with a gun, a loaded firearm, are being released on their own recognizance, even though a gun charge was not covered by the bail reform law that you couldnt remand people or require bail there, when 80 of them are being released on their own recognizance in brooklyn where we have to most shootings, when you have hundreds of cases not being thats because of covid. Even the people convicted of those cases, which is only 17 of her disposed of case, meaning it went to trial, there was a guilty plea, it ended only 17 of our cases are getting disposed of. And in those cases where theres a mandatory minimum of one to
three years, people are doing an average of nine months, thats really sending a message to the people in the street, a, the likelihood is im not going to get stopped, im not going to be arrested. If i am arrested i have an 80 chance in some places and a 50 chance in others that im getting out right that day. And if i even plead kbguilty or get convicted im only going away for nine months thats not a formula which discourages gun violence thats markedly unfair. The thing thats unfair about the gun violence and the irony of the time were talking about this is in our june to july numbers, 90 to 100 of our shooting victims were minorities. Thats blacks and hispanics. In one month, 100 of our murderer victims were. S this having a disparate effect on certain communities, and we
are not getting the same reaction from the press or politicians about that disparate effect. I cant hear. Sorry, commissioner. Finish your thought because i couldnt hear you for the last about 30 seconds. Go on. Well, the disparate effect i was describing, don, is the vast majority of the victims of this violence are in new yorks communities of color. Yeah. In some cases 100 depending on what period and numbers you look at. Thats devastating, and were not having the same pitch and done of outrage from our politicians or frankly our media about those woundings and deaths that we are at the other issues at the forefront here. Im not saying we have to have one conversation and not the other, but its hard to separate the conversations when you see the effect its having on lives. John, as you know, thats reason i contacted you, because theres real concern out there. Quite frankly im hearing from
people who said i have a friend who said, i was mugged for the first time in new york city since the 1970s. Don, since i have been sit here with you, we had a 16yearold shot in the bronx. We had a 19yearold shot on the upper west side. We had another teenager mugged at gunpoint by a group of other teenagers in central park. This is not the new york that we were talking about a few months ago. This is a different situation, and there are fixes. And your friends story resonates. Yeah. Chief madre, i want to bring you in and continue to talk about i want to talk about the covid thing and then talk about the real elephant in the room here, right, the whole defunding and police and so on and so forth. Lets talk about the impact of the covid. John mentioned this before. What is the impact of the coronavirus on policing . Are you seeing a connection
between the spikes in certain crime and the pandemic . Well, the pandemic exposed a lot of things. First of all, when you look at the effects of the pandemic youre talking about economic distress with families, youre talking about hunger, food deprivation, lost of loved ones and treasured icons. And then of course a lot of our institutions being closed our houses of worship, other places that people frequent just to relax and be able to unwind after working. And work itself. Jobs are shut down, so the pandemic had a great effect on new york city, a great effect on the Police Department. The Police Department many members of the Police Department were exposed to covid19 and suffered through covid19. Their families suffered through covid19. All those effects, economic
distress, loss of loved ones, a lot of members of the Police Department suffered through that. When you talk about covid19 Public Health crisis it caused gun violence is a Public Health crisis and should be viewed as one. We are seeing gun violence explode in the city. We have to look at it with a holistic approach of how were going to address Wit Community partners, strategically working together to reduce gun violence, to help shut down the iron pipeline when were talking on a bigger scale. Guns are still coming into the city at an alarming rate. Were talking about all those strategic partners, people that can help us from a holistic standpoint of providing resources and helping young people, or people wish to do gun violence. At the end of the day when people are ready to go out there and pull the trigger we need to make sure were supporting our police so they can do a dangerous job as well and remove
the people off the street who wish to do gun violence. John, lets dig into this a little more. When it comes to covid you have people being let out of jail who are being released because they dont want them exposed to covid. And then you have a court system, you talk at a little bit about this before, where people arent going to court, theyre having to make adjustments and all this playing out into the people on the streets and quite honestly, many of them, for whatever reason, are not to stigmatize, not stable or the best of citizens and thats the issue. I know there is real fear out there among citizens of new york. Can you talk to me about how covid plays into that . Sure. At the beginning of the year we probably had 5,400 people in the Rikers Island jail, which is the citys prison. At the same time the state was
making a giant push to get people out on parole, so they were paroling as many people as possible to reduce the state jail population. When you go on parole you have to say youre going live somewhere. A lot of people dont have resources to set that up outside, so many, many, many of them were paroled into new york citys homeless shelters. Then you had covid come along and then you had a further push. So right now, the population at Rikers Island is about 3,000, maybe a little less, prisoners. Thats a prison that once held 20 people. But that was a long time ago. We have been through reducing arrests been reducing that population. But when you enter covid into it now you have hundreds of people being released into the streets and you have people rearrested who are not going back to jail. You have people who there arent the grand juries to indict those cases as the law
requires. If you take our gun cases, 50 of them are indicted, 350 are unindicted. Who nose whats going to occur in those cases. Then you have this other factor, don, which is really important. Nypd, like the rest of the populous was hit hard by covid, so at some point you have 7,000 cops who are out sick, and then you see shootings start to rise in neighborhoods around the city where crime is down, fewer people are on the streets, crime and police calls for Service Everything was slowing down. Why were shootings going up . That started during covid because Police Presence was lower the challenges for the cops were greater and the criminal Justice System was starting to grind to a halt, and were still in the residual effects of that. Chief, john mentioned fixes. Lets talk about those. New yorks policing strategies of the past are well known. Broken windows, stop and frisk. Now the new term is precision policing. Talk to me about that. What is precision policing . Well, precision policing is really about knowing whos out there, who the bad actors are, whos committing the gun violence and the most crime. The small percentage of people who commit the most crime and make sure were directing our resources to those people. Again, like i said, were going to need a holistic approach, even with precision policing tn and working with our Community Members and allowing our Police Officers to do their job, a very difficult job. They need support in doing that job. Okay, i want to you stand by, gentleman. Were going to continue to talk about this. What does this surge in crime mean for the black lives Matter Movement . Here to discuss now is kirsten john foye, the president and founder of arc for justice. Thank you. Appreciate you joining me. You have been listening to this. Were talking about the big spikes in violence in several cities. How is that affecting communities of color and the black lives Matter Movement . Zbl well, thank you, don and good evening to chief madro and commissioner miller. Its having a chilling effect. In fact, i have done several vigils where the narrative and message coming out of these violent and horrific acts is black lives matter and were not directing that at an external force like the nypd or other Law Enforcement. Were directs that message internally. We cannot be hypocrites about the preservation and the importance of preserving black life. We cant demand that others respect black life, and we wont do so within our own community. But i just wanted to address there was many things that were said that i think is worth addressing. When you have a hammer, everything is a nail. And for the police to recognize that gun violence is a Public Health crisis, yet the only prescription they have offered are criminal justice pr prescriptions means that the ecosystem of Public Safety theyre referring to is not whole. We need to not just be addressing this current epidemic and scourge of gun violence with criminal justice tools, we need to apply other tools we have in our toolbox. We just in the city of new york zeroed out on top of covid shutting down all recreation for young people during the summer, we just had the budget zeroed out summer Youth Employmentprograms. That was the initial s ark lvo in the budgetary negotiation. So youthbigsed and youthtargeted austerity i believe was one of the triggers and catalysts for what we are seeing. Our young people are hungry and thirsty. They have shelter in the place for months. Remote learning in many instances has failed them. Many of our young people, elders in high school, have checked out. Summer Youth Employment was there goto. It was a thing they were looking forward so. So when the mayor and others came out initially and said, were not going to have any summer Youth Employment at all in this city, it send a chilling effect. And so you had gangs and other socalled bad actors exploit that reality, target our young people who are now
feeling rejected and dejected now getting a sense that they have some place to belong, they have a purpose. If nefarious, so be it, but they have a purpose. People are saying, well, if the government is not there to put money in your pocket, dont worry about it. Well figure it out. Just rock with us for the summer time, so we are seeing so kirsten let me just finish and you can pick it up. Yes, we are seeing the perfect storm of social phenomenon converging on this point, but to address all of it with criminal justice and Law Enforcement to the exclusion of fully funding some summer youth activities, even if its virtually the fail your to think outside the box, the failure to anticipate the impact of the covid, the impact of the remote learning
failures, the impact of this Public Health crisis on your young people, that failure of imagination, that failure of leadership is what led us to this point. Kirsten, i want to the people who are watching at home and my family members among them and people i know who live in new york city and harlem my neighbors are texting me now saying, listen, im watching your show. Its not just guns. Knife violence, stabbings, slashings are happening all the time, three to four times a day in west central harlem. More scary for guns than me at least. People are going to wonder, kirsten, how does a Youth Program and it is needed, and what you said how does that drive people, they go from that to a gun to killing someone to stabbing someone. We touched on it earlier. This is a Public Health crisis. Many of our young people are suffering from trauma. Trauma thats inflicted by violence. Trauma that originated out of poverty. The conditions that they live under, the absence of adequate housing, the absence of opportunities, whether they be educational or employment opportunities, the presence of violence. You know, we may have seen a decrease in the stats but on the streets those stats rarely play out the way they play out in a presentation in a board room. So our people are dealing with this untreated trauma, and then on top of that, they are told that the little opportunities that they were looking forward to will no longer be there, so instead of saying, lets throw the police at this, like we threw the police at social distancing enforcement inappropriately, and that wound up in a fracture of the good faith that took years to build
up it looks like a resurgence and reemergence and resurrection of stop and frisk under anew policy, social distancing enforcement. When we see police doing jobs they were not trained to do, not a quipped to do that quite frankly wont get to the core of the problem, we see criminal justice and Law Enforcement exacerbating the problem. All right. I want to bring in let me bring in i understand. I think we got it. But i want to bring in chief madre. Can you respond to him . He makes really good points about whats happening, people not having anything to do, the conditions that many people are set in, but do you see that as is that part of the issue here . Absolutely. When you look at a lot of our communities, communities that have been marginalized and underfunded and dont have to resources, of course its going play into it. Of course its a factor. And, you know, we need our
leaders. We need the governor and everyone involved to address it. This is what i talk about, we need a holistic approach to address crime in our communities with our communitybased organizations and our churches and house of worships, Crisis Management systems. All of these entities have to Work Together. We have to formalize the Police Community response to how we address crime, but also at the same time when we see this uptick in gun violence, we still need to police to be the police and address these crimes. John, you know, i want to you respond, because if y youre ju reducktive and simplistic about it you would say, well, because this happened right in this moment then that means this and this means this. What kirsten is talking about is something that has been happening for a long time, something that maybe should have been anticipated. How do you see what kirsten says playing into the crisis that were dealing with right now . Im having trouble
disagreeing with anything that he says. I even agree with him on the hammer and nail analogy. You know, this is the deal with police, don. Society has a series of safety nets. Theres health, youth services, Mental Health services, but throughout history whenever those safety nets have become worn or broken or had holes in them, when people start to fall through them, at the bottom theres always a cop. Thats why where that ends up. Whether its Mental Health or homeless or so on. When it comes to shooting if the nail is the bullet, then the police are going to be the hammer. Were going to focus on that and the folk is going to be enforcement. But his point is extraordinarily important. When it comes to youth, we have a Police Commissioner who when he was sworn in, his state of the nypd address was, my focus is going to be on the kids. How do we keep them from going
down that road . How do we put them on a better road . How do we help them in neighborhoods where they have the limited choices . And he started the youth commissioner program. He hired a Deputy Commissioner and said, your job is to wrangle other city agency into services theyre not providing whether its cleaning that park, opening that youth center, or providing services. We have something called operation ceasefire, and the chief can tell you all about th that. Where we went to the home of a kid and there was an intervention with a member of the kids family, the clergy, maybe a probation officer and said, these are your choices. The next shooting you may be involved and your choices are limited. Right now, can we steer you towards a job in well get you one. Can we steer you towards a Training Program . Well get you one. Are you having an addiction issue . You want a program . We can get you into one. You can write your ticket here, but youre headed to a bad place. So as the hammer whats that police tend to be in these things you know, weave trie a whole bunch of different tools but were not really the answer. Mr. Foye is right. Those programs need to be empowered, they need to be emboldened, and those safety nets need to have those holes fixed. The problem were facing right now is we have a crime surge, which requires more cops, and were about to have less and requires better deployments and more deployments and our overtime budget has been cut by 60 . Not the kind of thing that works logistically in a surge. And it was largely kind of in the politics of all of the protest movement to say, were doing something to punish the nypd by defunding. Thats also not what you do
during a crime surge, because for every one of these crimes theres a victim back there, one who losing their life, but thats where were supposed to be focussed and where were needed right now, and thats a resource issue. Yeah. We can talk all evening about defunding the police and what it means. I want to bring kirsten back in. I want toud hear what they had to say. Now i want to you respond to it. In your response, i want to ask you this. Black lives matter now has a lot of people behind it. A