America's Gun Violence

The card said, “James Dobbins III, New York City Health and Hospitals.” I called the number, and a few days later I met Dobbins in his office on the second floor of Lincoln Hospital. He is the assistant director of community affairs for a nonprofit organization called Guns Down, Life Up (G.D.L.U.), which is a part of the hospital. He had a diamond stud in one ear, and he wore a V-neck sweater-vest, a tie, and a receptive expression. Listening to strangers is what he does. As someone who served two prison terms, he qualifies as a “credible messenger”—someone people on the street will pay attention to. He began by telling me two facts: Lincoln Hospital, located in the southwest Bronx, has the busiest emergency room in the city, and people who are shot and survive have a fifty-per-cent chance of being shot again within five years. Of every ten people who present at a hospital with gunshot wounds and don’t die, five will eventually be shot again, and, of those, two will die.

Dobbins and others from G.D.L.U. go to the scenes where violence has occurred and make conversation with bystanders. They visit hospital bedsides, talk to friends and family of victims, and try to find alternatives to retaliation. After victims are out of the hospital, Dobbins keeps up with them. At any one time he is in touch with dozens of people still at risk of violence. Former victims sometimes call him at 3 a.m. “I’ll be in bed, my cell phone rings, I’ll answer, and I’ll hear, ‘He’s right outside my building, and I’m ’on blow the mofo’s head off!’ Then I just stay on the line and keep the brother talking.”

Dobbins is one of three men and two women who work for G.D.L.U.; they all stay current in the program’s “catchment area,” which includes the Melrose and Morris Heights neighborhoods, offering their programs for kids. The group’s bright-green hoodies and T-shirts feature the slogan “Guns Down, Life Up,” designed by Marley Marl, the hip-hop producer. Dobbins wants everybody in the neighborhood and in the entire city to start wearing them. In spare office space at the hospital, he started classes in fashion design that take kids through the process of producing and mass-marketing these garments. He also leads kids on rides around the city, on bicycles provided by the hospital, and has found a pro-bono recording studio for aspiring rappers and musicians.

“Kids around here see that crime pays,” Dobbins said. “They see an eighteen-year-old making two thousand, three thousand a day, driving a Benz. But a drug-dealing person is not who most kids are. They might like the look of it, but who they are deep down is someone else. We’re trying to help them find out who that is. I got out of prison the second time and decided I did not want to go back to hustling drugs. Today, I own a house in Queens, and I have two kids. I found what I love to do. I save people’s lives. People ask me what I do for a living, and I say, ‘I stop people from shooting people.’ ”

Guns Down, Life Up, multiplied by three dozen or more, gives you an idea of the number of anti-gun-violence organizations in New York City. Through Fischer and Harrison, I met three other men, all of them formerly incarcerated, who do work like Dobbins’s; “violence interrupter” is the job description. As mayor, Michael Bloomberg made gun violence one of his big issues, but he dealt with it more through policing, using tactics like “stop-and-frisk,” while also funding some community-based anti-violence groups. Mayor Bill de Blasio emphasized and encouraged the latter. In 2017, he formed the Mayor’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence. It oversees the city’s Crisis Management System, which coördinates and funds community-based anti-gun groups of all kinds. A lot of these, like G.D.L.U., follow a model known as Cure Violence, developed by a doctor in Chicago, which considers gun violence a disease and a public-health crisis curable by a multi-step treatment. The Kings Against Violence Initiative, which is part of Kings County Hospital, in Brooklyn, is another Cure Violence-based program; Kings County’s emergency room is the second busiest in the city.

There are faith-based anti-violence groups, such as the Sixty-seventh Precinct Clergy Council, also known as the God Squad, founded by ministers, one of whom hands out coupons for free funerals to active gang members he sees on the street. Smaller groups, sometimes called “mom-and-pop nonprofits,” include Harlem Mothers save (Stop Another Violent End), founded by Jackie Rowe-Adams, who lost two sons to shootings; Hip Hop 4 Life, which uses music and culture to promote a healthy, violence-free life style; life Camp (Love Ignites Freedom through Education), founded by Erica Ford, who uses yoga and mindfulness as tools for preventing violence; and g-macc (Gangstas Making Astronomical Community Changes), of Brooklyn, whose founder was arrested last year for threatening to have somebody killed (his former lawyer says he’s innocent).

As the Las Vegas conference showed, anti-gun nonprofits have grown all across the country. Forty thousand U.S. gun deaths in recent years work out to four or five an hour. Driven by grief, outrage, incalculable suffering, and a hope for peace, the anti-gun groups proliferate on one side, while on the other stands the amply funded and seemingly impregnable N.R.A.

In 2020, there were fifteen hundred and thirty-one shootings in New York City, almost twice as many as in 2019. The number of people hit by bullets was eighteen hundred and sixty-eight. Guns killed two hundred and ninety people in New York in 2020, an increase of eighty-eight per cent from 2019. Forty-eight people were shot in one day during the Fourth of July weekend, and nine of them died. Ninety-five per cent of the victims were Black or Hispanic. A man was shot and killed in the Bronx while crossing the street, holding his six-year-old daughter’s hand. A video showed a gun at the end of an arm emerging from the window of a passing car, the man falling, the little girl running away up the sidewalk.

Public-health studies have suggested some possible causes—the increase in unemployment, domestic abuse, drug and alcohol consumption, financial hardship, and firearm sales that came with the pandemic, along with the temporary shutdown of public support services.

In 1990 and 1991, nearly two thousand people were killed by gunfire in New York each year. Observers disagreed about why the numbers went down, to two hundred and ninety-seven, in 2016, but studies have shown that the more nonprofit organizations a neighborhood has, the fewer the shootings. Conservative critics blame the recent gun-violence surge on bail reform, decriminalization of minor offenses, and cuts in the police department’s budget. Replacement numbers of police officers have not kept up with retirements; fewer cops are on the streets. Dobbins thinks that shootings are up because everybody is at home and arguments start on the Internet. “Then, when people see each other on the street, the guns come out,” he said.

Dr. Jeffrey Butts, the director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, dismisses explanations based on bail reform and the rest as “self-serving law-enforcement theories.” He told me, “Young men of color in the ages between fifteen and twenty-five, the group most affected by gun violence, are also very likely to have the kind of jobs that disappeared in the pandemic.” Summer-job programs were cancelled, too. “And, of course, the schools have been closed for a year,” he went on. “These young men are angry; they go out on the streets, where there now are fewer people, and they take the opportunity to go after their rivals.”

Since before the 2020 election, gun stores nationwide have been overwhelmed, with lines of customers sometimes waiting around the block. Gun collectors are making money selling extra ammunition online. The N.Y.P.D. now confiscates dozens of guns in arrests every day. An online nonprofit called the Gun Violence Archive lists shootings in the U.S. almost as they occur. More than a hundred shootings are recorded in a typical twenty-four-hour period. The violence spreads across the map—occurring in cities, rural places, Indian reservations. If we could somehow hear all those shots in real time, it would sound as if the U.S. were in the middle of a non-stop low-intensity war.

Harrison has been teaching at the High School for Public Service, in Crown Heights, longer than anywhere else. Before the city suspended on-site teaching, the class met Wednesdays at twelve-fifteen. By that hour, students were keyed up and extra lively, the way you often see kids acting on the subway in the afternoon. On a Wednesday in midwinter, they showed up doing things other teachers might have kicked them out for. Arguing, throwing fake punches at one another, making crinkling noises with their empty water bottles, tossing wadded-up paper, shouting, they briefly overwhelmed the classroom. At one point, Harrison was having animated conversations with three or four kids at once and started to go hoarse. But soon she got everybody settled down.

The day’s lesson concerned the school-to-prison pipeline that Black and brown young people so often fall victim to. On the blackboard, she had written out the rap sheet of someone named James B. It listed the charges: “Trespassing; Petit Larceny; Trespassing; Disorderly Conduct; Indecent Exposure; Trespassing; Fare Evasion.” Someone asked what petit larceny is. She explained that it’s the theft of something of small value, as compared with grand larceny, the theft of something pricier: “Petit larceny is if you steal a phone charger. Grand larceny is if you steal a phone.”

She told the students to split into groups of six and talk among themselves about who this James was and how he acquired his rap sheet. As they were working, Harrison hit a speed-dial number on her phone and ordered pizza and sodas. After five or ten minutes, she asked the kids how old they thought James was and what his family life was like. Every group said he was about their age—fifteen or sixteen—and lived with his mother. None said his father was in the picture. They all gave him sisters, mostly younger. Harrison asked, “So why does he have three arrests for trespassing?” A consensus said that he was kicked out of the house, maybe because he got in a fight with his mother’s boyfriend, and then went into nearby apartment buildings to sleep. Petit larceny? He shoplifted a honey bun from a bodega because he was hungry. Fare evasion? He had no money. Disorderly conduct? “His father is gone, and maybe James thinks he has to be the man of the family, and he got in a fight with somebody who said something mean about his sister,” a girl said.

A big stack of pizza boxes arrived, along with some thirty-two-ounce bottles of soda. The discussion continued as the kids ate. Harrison said, “So, once James has this rap sheet, maybe his school administration and the police think of him only as that—a kid with a rap sheet. So what do you think will happen if James is then arrested for something more serious, like getting caught with a gun?” The kids all said he would go to prison. “If you were the judge, what would you do?” A majority quickly answered that they would send him to prison, too.

“But do you remember what we learned about stereotyping?” Harrison said. “As you just discovered when you were talking about James, there is an actual person with a complicated life behind the rap sheet. Most of you thought only of giving him jail time, and there’s an even worse stereotype associated with having been in prison. James gets out, now he has a prison record—and, by the way, I know some very good men who have prison records—and he can’t get a job, so he starts selling drugs, and maybe at some point he again picks up a gun so he won’t get robbed. In the next class, we’re going to talk about restorative justice, and peer mediation, and anything we can come up with together that would change James’s story.”

Continued next post