NYC Ceasefire was launched in New York City in December 2014 in collaboration with David Kennedy and the National Network for Safe Communities. NYC Ceasefire recognizes that the majority of violence in New York City is committed by a small number of people involved in street groups—gangs, crews, and drug sets—at great risk for violent victimization or offending. It focuses on reducing violence by communicating clearly and directly with these group members through call-ins and custom notifications.
NYC Ceasefire gives group members a three part message from community leaders (including faith leaders, mothers of murdered children, ex-offenders, and others) that the violence is unacceptable and must stop, from an unprecedented law enforcement partnership (including the New York City Police Department, King’s Country District Attorney’s Office, NYC Department of Probation, New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision and others) that continued violence will be met with swift and certain consequences aimed at groups as a whole, and from social service providers that help is available for those who want to change.
See the below videos for more details about the NYC Ceasefire strategy, or see the National Network's FAQs.
Some police departments do carefully track shootings, but most keep that data internal. In New York City, for example, police track nonfatal shootings rigorously, Aborn said, starting from when victims walk into an emergency room with a gunshot wound. “We really like to unpack shootings,” he said. “It’s almost an epidemiology approach: understanding what’s causing the disease. Without that data, it’s very hard to do that kind of analysis.”
But other cities can’t tell you how many people are shot in their own jurisdictions, said David Kennedy, the director of the National Network for Safe Communities at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. That includes many of the biggest cities in the country. When the Major Cities Chiefs Association routinely surveys its members for violent-crime data, only 40 of its 69 member agencies are usually able to provide the number of nonfatal shootings. And when The Baltimore Sun tried last year to compare lethality rates for shootings, it found that only half of the country’s 30 biggest cities even keep that data.
The district attorneys for Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens collectively moved to dismiss about 644,000 warrants, the latest in a string of actions to reduce the number of people passing through the criminal courts and city jails on charges that would otherwise merit little more than a fine or community service.
The tech giant’s philanthropic arm will grant $2 million to fund gun violence prevention programs in communities of color in 10 American cities. Most of the investment will go to programs that follow the model of Ceasefire, a violence-reduction strategy that coordinates law enforcement, community stakeholders, and social services to drive down shootings. The grants will also establish job-training programs for gunshot victims and perpetrators, and workshops for law enforcement on anti-bias policing.
In encouraging news for critics of the "stop-and-frisk" policing era presided over by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the racial disparity in street stops by NYPD officers narrowed between 2013 and 2015. This discovery came from a report filed in federal court by the court-appointed monitor overseeing the Police Department.
NYPD consultant John Linder is helping develop technology that "will deliver to police and their executives real-time measures of public attitudes — whether trust is going up or down, whether the sense of safety is going up or down, and whether the job approval of the NYPD is going up or down—by neighborhood."
National Network Director David Kennedy comments, “New York City, in many ways, convinced the rest of the country that things like zero tolerance were the way to make communities safe, and now it’s showing the country that you absolutely do not need to do that, you should not do it, and there are much, much better and less damaging ways to work with communities to produce public safety.”
Kevin Hagen for The New York Times
"Eric Gonzalez says he wants to continue the work, especially in healing community relations, that Mr. Thompson championed before dying in October."
An Rong Xu for The New York Times
"In an exclusive tour of the new lab, Fortune got a glimpse of Law & Order in the digital age. The [New York DA's] lab is Exhibit A in how America’s biggest city is embracing big data analytics and a dash of hacker culture to solve complex crimes."
"In his first major policy address as New York City’s police commissioner, James P. O’Neill on Tuesday invoked the unsolved killing of a young mother on a South Bronx playground as symptomatic of past failures in policing and as a guide to building trust among black and Latino city residents."
"The number of stop-and-frisk searches continues to plunge through the floor, while the crime rate continues to drop, the New York Civil Liberties Union said Tuesday."
