NYC NOW - Community-Led Efforts Help Drive Down Gun Violence in East Harlem NYCHA Complexes

Episode Date: June 21, 2025

While gun violence has risen in public housing across much of New York City this year, East Harlem is bucking the trend. Shootings in the neighborhood’s NYCHA complexes have dropped 30% since 2023, compared to just 7% citywide. WNYC’s Brittany Kriegstein reports on the coalition of police, nonprofits, and community members working together to keep violence down, and why that progress remains fragile.

NYC, now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. I'm Junae Pierre. Happy Saturday. East Harlem has long been one of the city's hardest hit neighborhoods when it comes to gun violence, especially in public housing. But something changed. While shootings have gone up in other NYCHA complexes across the city, East Harlem has seen a steep drop. WMYC's Brittany Crickstein has been following the decline. Tell us how you came across this story, Brittany. I used to visit East Harlem for reporting a lot.

I get near weekly alerts from either the 25 or the 23 precinct or the 28. Most of them were tied to public housing. But about two years ago, those alerts stopped. Then I took a look at the 2024 numbers for gun violence in the city and something really stood out. Now, we talk a lot about this citywide shootings have been going down. But we've also done reporting that showed that last year in 2024, there were public housing zones where gun violence went up, so kind of bucked the citywide trend. But in East Harlem, among public housing, gun violence was way down. And gun violence didn't just drop by a little bit.

Shootings there fell by 30 percent over two years. For comparison, the citywide drop in that time period was just 7%. Wow. What area specifically in East Harlem are we talking about here? Sure. So when we started doing some mapping work, we saw a real shooting hotspot emerge, and this was on East 1002nd Street between 1st Avenue and FDR Drive. For context, there were only about 10 of these hotspots in the whole city. So that sort of shows what was happening up there through about 2022. Yeah. So what caused this shift? One of the people at the center is Lou Zuckman. He is the executive director of Scan Harbor, which is one of the main non-profit. up in East Harlem that helps steer young people away from violence.

He actually was involved in the civil rights movement as one of the freedom riders, and he was jailed in the South. And then he came back to New York and did a lot of work with gangs to dispel violence. So even though he comes from a different background than these kids, I mean, he's white, he's Jewish, he grew up in Forest Hills. He understands them and they really trust him. Lou explains that during the pandemic, they lost touch with a lot of the kids and youth that they really help.

Life is much more communal. So COVID was a very dangerous thing because it cut that out in a way. So my belief, this neighborhood blew up during that period. And so when they were able to get things up and running again, Lou decided to create this coalition of community organizations, nonprofits, youth workers, and city agencies working together to keep the peace. I think that was helpful because we were able to dent, if this crew is going after that crew.

We can almost always know where the next problem is going to be. Because someone said something on social media if people saw it, someone did something to someone's brother, whatever it is. All right, what are we going to do? The DA's office, New York City Housing Authority, and the NYPD, all sitting around a physical table, sharing information and deciding what needs to be done to keep violence down in the neighborhood. Think of it like a Jenga tower,

where all of these different blocks are holding each other up. That's basically what it takes to keep the peace in East Harlem. It was problem solving together as a community before things got to the point where someone got killed. Once someone's killed, there's nothing you can do. No one wants to deal with that. They need each other. Exactly. They rely on the expertise that the other has.

That's really interesting. I'd like to know more about this coalition. Did you ever attend a meeting? Yeah, so I did. I've attended several meetings. One meeting where they sort of discussed some recent incidents that have been happening. and how to deploy their resources going forward. The police captain said, okay, I can put a police car on this specific street if you guys are seeing some tension over there.

And then the nonprofits were saying, okay, we can talk to so-and-so kids and trying to de-escalate the situation, things like that. And then the more recent meeting I went to was a new thing they tried where they invited really young kids. We're talking 10 to 15 years old. Wow. kids as young as 10 talking about policing and gun violence just seems out of place, but not in this instance. Right. Unfortunately, this is the lived experience of some of these kids. They've seen gun violence. They've heard about it. They have friends who've been through it. They've been told by their parents, don't walk here. You can't go there. And so for them, this is a real thing. And the reason that they were invited to this meeting, even so young, is that these organizations realized that these kids are the ones who then become the kids who are getting into some of this trouble. Why do we think about youth so much? Because unfortunately, a lot of the new violence happens with teens, as young as 13, largely 15 to 19 years old.

So it's all our collective effort in order to try to stem violence in that age group. That's Deputy Inspector Rebecca Bukovster Tavares, one of the most important people sitting at that table. Now, she runs policing for all of the Nica complexes in East Harlem. that's about 38,000 residents. And her officers are tasked with just responding to any calls that happen within those buildings. Deputy Inspector Bucasur Tavares has talked about a lot that kids are born in a certain complex, and they might not even know why this is, but they're told to hate the people who live across the street. Our crime related to violence largely has to do with crews.

A lot of it is identity violence or identity crews. One particular group will live in a series of buildings and not really like another group that lives in another building. So that's where a lot of our crew violence comes from. They may not even remember the origin of some of these beefs that go back generations, but all of a sudden they're swept up in it. And sometimes they don't have the mentorship to steer them in a different direction. I'm wondering, is it really just about age or is it something deeper, Brittany? Well, there are so many things at play that have. affect gun violence. Everyone I spoke with said that a lot of this is caused by structural problems.

Things we also see in the rest of the city. Bad housing, past trauma, lack of opportunities and jobs and just things to keep young people busy. And then these community beefs that unfold among separate housing developments, age is sometimes just the most visible piece, but it could be really just the tip of the iceberg. All right, Brittany. So statistically, summer is the time where violence is up in the city. It seems like these groups are walking a very fine line. Yes, they are. Even with all this progress, Jenei, the perception of safety is really fragile. And perception and reality are two different things, right? With perception, if there's even one incident, people can already feel like it's a violent community. I spoke to many residents who

said they felt like, yeah, things have gotten safer. But I also spoke to a lot of residents who said that they didn't think that things had gotten safer because there were two shootings that happened in East Harlem in the middle of May. These were shootings involving teens. And I've been speaking with the police captain. I've been speaking with the local organization saying that they are doing everything they can to communicate with each other to get in front of this. Because if they don't, one of these shootings can spark retaliation that can last for years. Yeah. It could also have an impact on all the progress that that community has made. All right. So we've heard from police. We've heard from nonprofit leaders. But what about the spaces where these young people are spending

their time, the Cornerstone Centers. Tell me about those. Cornerstone centers are actually citywide. They're about a hundred of them. And they are inside New York City Housing Authority complexes. So they have the space to operate there. And everyone I spoke to said they're really important. Because a lot of these kids only have to go downstairs or around the block to go and be welcomed and have mentorship in different opportunities, education, sports, whatever they really need is literally so close. I met 19-year-old Johnny Kodogan at the Wagner House's Cornerstone Community Center. He says he used to come to the Cornerstone Center when things were bad, but lately, he says, things have actually gotten a lot better. I grew up around this. He

used to have big meetings in this room right here and then just talk about it, how we're going to kick the game memories or how we're going to stop this, this and that. And sometimes they pull kids from rival complexes. Like my man's from Dyckman. Like I bring them down here. I used to have them here almost every single day because, like, I wanted them to grow accustomed to coming to my block. You come around here, I'm going to make sure you're safe.

This is not work that takes a break. And many of these community centers are going to stay open until 11 p.m. to be places for kids to go on those warm summer nights when they have nothing else to do. I wonder if people in power understand how fragile this progress really is. Well, that's a real concern. A lot of this coalition work is held together by grants, some city grants, some federal grants. And the problem right now is that the federal Department of Justice has cut a lot of its grants to some of these organizations that do this, they say, life-saving critical work. Some of them are now losing their job.

Exodus is one organization I spoke to that work directly with high-risk teens in East Harlem alongside Scan Harbor and the others. And they say that because of the Department of Justice cuts, they lost part of a $2 million Department of Justice grant that was scheduled to pay out over several years. So they would have been receiving it now, but some of those funds have been frozen. And they had to do immediate layoffs. They cut six staff members. and they're not a big organization. And they said that these cuts will really impact the work that they're able to do. And not to mention, change the lives of those people who are so dedicated to this work.

I spoke to some of those Exodus team members that had been laid off. They say they're going to continue their work because they think it's that critical. Sincere Wilson says it's been a struggle. For instance, we just got a report that one of our participants got locked up recently. And that is a direct result of us not being, they're not being able to do the job that we've been doing. There are a few participants that are actually fair for their life. And I know we're focusing our conversation right now on East Harlem, but that will also have a ripple effect across the five boroughs. Absolutely.

Gun violence has been declining in the five boroughs over the past few years. And Mayor Adams and police officials have celebrated that. But that, of course, is tenuous too. And as the summer comes around, it's unclear what could happen if these cuts are really far-reaching or if there are other factors at play. East Harlem is a great example of a community that's really tried to mitigate this violence. And some of their strategies really are applicable to many other neighborhoods in the city. And that's what we hope to communicate with this reporting, that these are things that maybe other communities can replicate. hate. But if things really start to fall apart, it can be really tough to make that progress

to claw things back and to keep it together, keep the peace. It's hard. That's WMYC's Brittany Craigstein. Thanks, Brittany. Thanks so much, Janae. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. Have a lovely weekend. We'll be back on Monday.