On June 2, a crowd of Brooklyn elected officials gathered at Restoration Plaza in Bed-Stuy to launch Gun Violence Awareness Month, with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, and Council Members Chi Ossé and Crystal Hudson on hand. The numbers behind the photo were genuinely good: year-to-date shootings citywide were down about 6 percent, and Brooklyn led the city with a 47.6 percent drop in shooting incidents. The thing worth a second look is who was throwing the event.
The launch was led by the Office of Neighborhood Safety, part of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new Mayor’s Office of Community Safety. That office is a much smaller thing than the one Mamdani campaigned on. He promised a full Department of Community Safety. What he announced in March and stood up is an office that, by City and State’s reporting, runs on roughly five full-time staff and oversight of a few preexisting programs.
The timing made the gap hard to miss. The day before the Bed-Stuy launch, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch told a City Council budget hearing that the police department and the new community-safety office had not even started coordinating on who does what. “Those conversations have not yet commenced,” Tisch said. So the office holding a launch on gun violence prevention was, the day before, described by the police commissioner as not yet on speaking terms with the police.
The setting carried its own argument. Restoration Plaza at 1368 Fulton Street is home to the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, founded in the 1960s as one of the country’s first community development corporations, a building that has long stood for the idea that a neighborhood gets safer through investment rather than through policing alone. Putting the signature month of the five-person Office of Community Safety there is a bet on exactly that premise, before the office has proven it has the staff, the budget, or the working relationship to deliver on it.
The shooting declines are real and predate this office, so the honest read is that the month is part awareness campaign, part coming-out party for an agency still under construction. Whether it grows into the department Mamdani promised, or stays the five-person Office of Community Safety, is the story to track past June.
Gun Violence Awareness Month centers on Wear Orange and National Gun Violence Awareness Day on June 5, with Wear Orange Weekend running June 5 to 7. You can find and RSVP to a Wear Orange event near you, which is the part of the month that does not depend on whether City Hall’s newest office is fully staffed.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily
