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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Yesterday morning, we heard from Mayor de Blasio and Police Commissioner Shea that gun violence is down in the city.

Mayor de Blasio: Comparing June of 2021 to June of 2020, shootings down almost 20%, number of victims down over 26%, murders down 23%.

Brian Lehrer: So that bit of relief and encouragement came yesterday morning, but in the afternoon, Governor Cuomo announced he is declaring a disaster emergency on gun violence statewide citing the statistic that--

Governor Cuomo: Shootings were up 38% in New York City over the first six months compared to 2020.

Brian Lehrer: The governor mentioned that 26 people were shot over the 4th of July weekend alone, not even counting Monday, so up, down, or sideways, whether you want to look at the decline in shootings in June or the increase compared to last year for the first six months as a whole, there is a problem here with especially young men and guns. It's one of the main reasons Eric Adams won the Democratic mayoral primary too, as we've been discussing, and the governor announced short-term and long-term strategies for implementing a state of emergency response, including a jobs program for 21,000 young New Yorkers.

With us now are three authors of a field research report published last year that dug into the reasons why young men carry guns in the hopes that they can shed some light into why the use of guns has escalated and maybe what can be done about it. We'll hear their findings and get reaction to the mayor and the governor. The Center for Court Innovation is the group that released the report, and it's titled Gotta Make Your Own Heaven: Guns, Safety, and the Edge of Adulthood in New York City.

To talk about their findings and recommendations and react to the news, we're joined by the research director, Rachel Swaner, at the Center for Court Innovation; their deputy research director, Elise White; and Basaime Spate, a community-based research coordinator. Welcome back to the show, Rachel Swaner and Elise White, and welcome, Basaime Spate. Good morning.

Elise White: Good morning, Brian.

Rachel Swaner: Happy to be here.

Basaime Spate: Good morning. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Rachel Swaner, this study doesn't look at how many kids in the city are carrying guns but the reasons they do?

Rachel Swaner: Right. We talked to 330 people, young people ages 16 to 24, in three different neighborhoods in New York City that have high levels of gun violence. Morrisania in the Bronx, Brownsville in Brooklyn, and East Harlem in Manhattan.

Gun violence is increasing in cities, and it's often attributed to youth gang conflicts, and young folks are often primary victims and perpetrators. We wanted to try to understand what are the reasons young people are carrying guns, what are their social networks like, and what roles do guns play in these networks.

Brian Lehrer: Elise White, who exactly did you try to reach in your interviews and what were you asking them?

Elise White: We wanted to look specifically at 16- to 24-year-olds, because we know that that's the age range when gun use typically peaks. We were asking them a wide variety of questions. In most of the research that exists, it focuses on either white suburban gun-carrying or if it looks at all at inner city or urban gun use in Black and brown communities, it's extremely old or it has a very small sample size.

What we did is we wanted to talk to young people who had carried a gun in the last year and find out from them what are the drivers. Not just look at specific crime patterns or look at specific gang interaction patterns but really how do their lives function generally speaking, what are their interactions with institutions, structures of power around them, and how do these play out and express themselves in their decisions or their need to carry a gun for safety and survival.

Brian Lehrer: Basaime Spate, you are one of the people who conducted the interviews, your own background contributed to your doing that effectively, from what I see, do you want to share some of your own story to introduce yourself to our listeners and how you came to approach these interviews?

Basaime Spate: Yes. Pretty much my experience is my family history of gun violence, I lost some close friends, my father, and two brothers to gun violence, and then my experience just growing up in the foster system and getting involved in the streets with gangs across the city and across other states is what gave me a clear foundation experience and knowledge on how these things operate. I really got into this work during Cure Violence, working for SOS part of the Cure Violence model, and there, I stopped a lot of shootings and stopped a lot of retaliations and done a lot of mediation.

That's why I gained a lot of my skill sets, but there, I was able to meet Rachel there. She was bringing in a survey around this topic that we're talking about now, and I was helping her with giving her feedback on this survey, helping rephrase questions, personal questions, or how to ask gang-involved individuals, and we then [unintelligible 00:05:45] areas would be best where high gun violence is taking place. Then I joined the project and came on as security and then from there, I just started training to do interviews, then I became part of the research team.

What really got me into this work, because I never had noticed or any research had never been done like this before, especially around gun violence. Then it also gives you the power to control your narrative because I'm able to go out there with my experience and maybe sit down and talk with individuals, engage and have these conversations because we relate, because we have those experience, but when I say control your narrative, it means that it gives me the power to control the data and  

then sit down with Elise and then put this data together and present this data and not saying that-- Then also gave us the experience to say that instead of people who don't really know our experience, telling the well-off stories, and what they think a solution should be.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let me ask you about one thing to start getting into the content of that. I should tell our listeners that this research was done shortly before the pandemic, and we all know we've seen a big spike in gun violence in New York and elsewhere that started during the pandemic. Does what you learned in the research tell you anything about why we saw this spike of shootings during lockdown?

Basaime Spate: Yes, it was more like what they experience on a daily-- It's this lack of education, and when we talk to these young men and women, these are the things that they want, but there's also like an invisible wall of access being denied to them, and with the pandemic, everything that's shutting down. We shut down schools, kids couldn't travel. Mainly kids go to school to eat, you know what I'm saying?

To express themselves, just to get out whatever is going on in a home or in a neighborhood, but now, all that shutdown, and people are not working, people can barely pay their bills, barely can put food in their house, and it makes people come outside and people can't go nowhere because they're trapped in this one neighborhood. Of course all these things, it's going to escalate.

Then within that pandemic, we had nothing to send in there to-- because everything was new, the pandemic shut down the world. It was new to everybody and scary at the same time but then it just added on top of what these neighborhoods are experiencing already on a daily, such as oppression, harassment, and these sort of things. With that happening, yes, we were going to see a rise in crime and rise in a lot of things that we have witnessed already.

Brian Lehrer: Rachel, do you want to add to that? What did you find in the study were the main drivers of gun use among mostly these young men?

Rachel Swaner: Yes. I mentioned that we talked to 333 participants ages 16 to 24. I do want to just say that 79% were men. The majority were men, but we did have 21% women, but using our study, were mostly carrying to increase their feelings of safety. Violence was a near universal experience among the young people we interviewed. 81% had been shot or shot at, 88% had had a friend or family member shot, 70% had witnessed someone getting shot, 67% had been attacked with a different weapon, like a knife or a bat.

They held a widespread belief that they could be victimized at any time, and gun served to protect them from real or perceived threats from other gun carriers; rival gang members, residents of different housing developments, and the police, and they didn't feel the police protected them from any of it. Given these realities, the hyper-vigilance that seemed apparent in so many of their narratives constructively can be understood as a trauma reaction in a causal relationship to the death and threat of death they live with daily, and gun-carrying served as one mechanism of

self-preservation. As Basaime was saying, during the pandemic, a lot of these institutions that gave them some support shut down completely. It's all of these things.

Their violence, their trauma was activated because of just not knowing what was going to happen, and again, feeling like they were experiencing community trauma, being left behind, not being protected, not being cared about. A lot of these communities were disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 as well.

Brian Lehrer: Elise White, do you want to elaborate on that idea that people are carrying guns for safety as they see it as opposed to for aggression? I think that might be the opposite of what a lot of other people assume.

Elise White: Absolutely. What we heard over and over again from participants is a sense of complete institutional abandonment. They're lacking any pathway to survival in the mainstream economy, through the education system. They're not protected by policing institutions and in fact are targeted often, that's their feeling, their feeling is that they are under attack and that they're being targeted by police.

There really is no emotional or social service support network for these young people specifically. We know that there are a lot of great organizations that provide really important and meaningful services to young people in our neighborhoods and neighborhoods where most of the residents are people of color, but these specific subset of young people are generally very seldom reached. They're on their own. The gangs can be understood as a structure often for them, and Basaime can certainly speak to this of emotional support, of economic support and safety, and certainly safety in the streets.

For them, they, over and over again, and this absolutely has been exacerbated by the pandemic. They feel that they don't know who to trust, and they don't know who potentially could come at them. At any moment, they feel something could come, something could happen, they could be shot, they could be stabbed. This is because-- this isn't just like a general sense of paranoia. This is based on lived reality.

This is, as Rachel mentioned with statistics, they know so many people who have been shot, so many people who have been killed. These are friends, these are family members, these are neighbors, and so for them, if they feel that the police engaged with them in a militaristic fashion, engage them in sort of a war-like context and are not a source of safety or protection, they have very few options, frankly, so they see the gun-carrying as a means to survival. You hear it over and over and over again. Actually some of the questions that we asked looked at, asked about self-defense. The mechanism they mentioned over and over again was carrying the gun.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we might be able to take, in our limited time, a few phone calls with questions or even your own stories for our guests, the authors of the Center for Court Innovation's report titled Gotta Make Your Own Heaven: Guns, Safety, and the Edge of Adulthood in New York City, research director Rachel Swaner, deputy research director Elise White, and Basaime Spate, community-

based research coordinator, for the Center for Court Innovation. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Basaime, I'm going to invite you to continue on that same thread, because it seems like we're hearing about sort of which came first, the chicken or the egg effect, with respect to carrying weapons. If they don't trust the police and fear violence at the hands of police or other civilians, so by carrying guns, they feel more safe, but then they also wind up drawing the attention of the police as a result, and there's the risk of more shootings taking place because there are more guns.

Basaime Spate: Right. We will go back to what Elise was saying, just the protection of it all, being forgotten by the government-- just witnessing the military [unintelligible 00:14:46] the police on a daily. Due to that, they feel like they're alone. With the neglect, that they feel alone, you have these organizations that are formed or these networks that are formed and then labeled as gangs. When we sat down, and I talked to them, our data says that 88% had been in gangs, 66% were still active.

The reasoning for joining gangs was protection, was the number one primary reason; family history of gang involvement or people were born into it, gang serving as a family, providing love and emotional support, gangs also providing material support such as money, access ways to make money, food and housing. Gangs was also described as having a complex role in community such as positive aspects and negative aspects.

What our data-- what they had told us are the positive aspects of these gangs was, gangs was providing support for children and adults in their communities where other resources, institutes was not doing that. Things like clothing, backpacks, school supplies, and foods. These gangs also organized community events like basketball tournaments, cookout, food drives, and block cleanups. They also talked about, the services of neighborhoods that's have mistrust, and they feel that they could be victimized at any time.

We're talking about just a generalized fear that hovers these neighborhoods on a daily, needing protection from people seeking retaliation and [unintelligible 00:16:22] or fear of being shot by the police. They also didn't feel protected by the police. The guns was serving as a self-defense and self-preservation. They also spoke that, 78% reported that they felt safe when carrying a gun. That's a lot. 63% felt safe when there were not carrying.

They felt like they were between a rock and a hard place unprotected from other gun users, but like not protected by the police, were simultaneously being punished for carrying guns for their protection. Many of them talked about the exercise and restraints when it comes to guns and only use it when they felt like it was absolutely necessary.

Brian Lehrer: Rachel, on what Basaime just said, about merely carrying for safety and for you as research director of the group, that's called the Center for Court

Innovation, the winner of the Manhattan DA Primary, Alvin Bragg, who obviously would work in court. He'll be a guest here tomorrow. He says on his campaign website, "Violence and crime are often rooted in a sense of injustice and distrust of the government." The same thing you've all been saying.

"The traditional response by law enforcement to crime is greater police presence, crackdowns, and shows of force." He writes, "which only then serve to reinforce distrust and discontent in the community. Thousands of lives are shattered by violence or incarceration, further weakening the community socially and economically continuing the spiral." Bragg proposes a multifaceted plan of social in addition to law enforcement approaches.

Here's the thing I want to ask you about. At the prosecution level, Bragg says, "We will do away with the most common outcome in current gun prosecutions. One- to three-year jail or prison sentences for the possession of a firearm." He says, "Mere possession cases are the most commonly prosecuted gun offense. Clearly those firearm possession cases associated with a specific incident of violence are and should be treated differently, but these cases of possession alone do not meaningfully incapacitate those who truly drive gun violence. They force those who are not drivers of violence onto a path that almost inexorably leads to recidivism."

Does anything in the Center for Court Innovation's work back up or refute that theory?

Rachel Swaner: That's a great question. I think around locking people up for gun-carrying, and I think he is right. There is plenty of research out there that shows that locking up fewer people is going to make us safer. You compare people similar, like released and detained before trial studies in New York, in Miami, in Philadelphia, Houston, and it consistently linked detention being in jail, in prison, in juvenile detention center with a modestly greater risk of re-offending once that period is over.

Incarceration has well-known criminogenic effects like disrupting people's family and work lives, including their long-term earning potential along with access to housing and any treatment that they might be receiving and exposing them to dehumanizing and traumatizing effects of jail. I know that we've been working on trying to work to close Rikers Island, which is notorious for having violence and people being traumatized by their experience there, so being locked up isn't going to make us safer, it's going to increase people's criminogenic risk. That is true.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get a caller in here, Dominique in Bushwick, you're on WNYC. Hi, Dominique.

Dominique: Hi, there, so so nice to be with you all. I'm just wanting to come on and express as a Black woman how I feel about all this. I really appreciate the talk about support and how lack of resources is what ends up happening. If people in communities where violence happens feel supported, if they feel housed, if they feel fed, if they feel like police are not going to come for no reason to their communities, harass them, harm them, kill them. If those things were true, then we would not really be dealing with the rock and the hard place that was being talked about, but since

those things are not true, since the baseline of people's needs are not being met, what are you going to do?

The folks that talk about gun violence as scary, obviously scary, but aggressive or "these people are wild, and they don't know how to do things in their life" and blah-blah-blah, they've never been in a situation where this is the choice, like, excuse me raising my voice, but it's life or death quite literally. That's what I have to say. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be able to say that to people, so thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much. Please call us again. Ana Maria in Lower Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Ana Maria.

Ana Maria: Hi. Good morning. I'm sorry, I'm just coming out of the train. Yes, I totally disagree with what the guest is saying about that it is the fault of COVID, because it's everybody's fault, but I don't see that. What I see is all these kids shooting randomly to anyone and for anything. Then it's everybody's fault, but what about the parents.

They never come up in this research, the parent. Parent has to be responsible for the kids that you decided to have. Like I said before, I have a grandchild, he's 16 years old, and when he goes out, I say to him, "When you go out, you try to avoid as much as you can. If something comes up, walk away, call the police." Why? Because once you get in trouble, your life is going to be damaged forever, you will never be able to work, you will never be able to do this because when you have a record, that's it, you are done.

The last thing that I want to say is a lot of young people, they have very expensive tastes, they like these very expensive sneakers, they drink, the phones and all that. They also don't do good in school, then what is there for them to have all these things? Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: Ana Maria, thank you for your call. Basaime, what are you thinking listening to those two calls? Contrasting calls.

Basaime Spate: I'm going to actually let Elise handle this one. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Okay. All right. Elise White, deputy research director for the Center for Court Innovation, want to take it?

Elise White: Sure. It's an interesting back-to-back. What I can say is that our data definitely, definitely indicates that young people are not shooting randomly. It might look random from the outside, but they are making very calculated decisions about when and how it happens if it has to happen. They are very aware. We talked to 330 gun carriers. I do want to be clear about this. This is a very large sample for this kind of in-depth interview. They are very aware of their own mortality, and they're very aware that they are holding someone else's life in their hands.

When they enter the decision to pull a trigger, that is what they're holding. A much better analogy than wild kids in the street out of control, is a soldier, and the kinds of trauma that they carry as a result of that are very similar to veterans who have been

in combat. I think that's why you see substance use at the rates that you do in the same way that you see it in veterans, there is self-medication, there's self-preservation, there's an effort to-- When we interviewed about this, we have data on this. They are using substances in an effort to help them manage affect because of trauma.

Brian Lehrer: We only have a minute left in the segment, and Basaime, I don't know if you've seen the governor's plan introduced yesterday in conjunction with a state of emergency, first state in the country to declare a gun violence state of emergency. He says, by treating gun violence as a public health emergency, as they treated COVID, meaning both short-term and long-term strategies, we can get gun violence more under control. One centerpiece program the governor announced is a $57 million dollar budget to create 21,000 jobs for young New Yorkers. I'm just curious if you want to react to that at all. Do you see a direct connection between that and short-term reductions in shootings?

Basaime Spate: Yes, I believe in services, but when we say 21,000 jobs, what type of jobs are we talking about? Are we talking about jobs that they can be in, and it could be a career-wise job, so they could be successful and able to purchase a home and able to buy food and able to take care of their children so they don't have to live in a daily what we talked about war-torn areas where they have to experience this trauma on a daily and feel left out and abandoned and neglected. They can't really concentrate on their true focus and their goals of how to be successful in life because they're always denied these services that we constantly keep talking about or these resources to help them differ from that.

For me, any services that we are talking about that could bring to help these neighborhoods and get them out of what we are talking about or what we are spending all this money towards to because at the end of the day if we're talking about services and how to get them out or whatnot and jobs to help their families and stuff like that, then that's okay, but if we're talking about alternatives of imprisonment and how to criminalize them, that's not a solution for us, and our data does not present that.

Brian Lehrer: Basaime Spate, research coordinator; Rachel Swaner, research director; Elise White, deputy research director of the Center for Court Innovation, their report is titled Gotta Make Your Own Heaven: Guns, Safety, and the Edge of Adulthood in New York City. Thank you, all three of you for sharing your time and your expertise with us.

Elise White: Thank you for having us.

Rachel Swaner: Thank you for having us.

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