A Friend's Plea To Eric Adams: We Don't Need More Cops

BED-STUY, BROOKLYN — Alarm bells went off for Barry Cooper as he watched the mayor unveil a sweeping "Blueprint to End Gun Violence," so the nonprofit leader decided to contact a friend he's known for years: Eric Adams.

"I was hoping to see that we would firmly approach [gun violence] from a mental health standpoint," Cooper, who leads Brooklyn nonprofit The BRO Experience Foundation, said of Adams' plan. "He used the police-officer approach."

The plan — which revives a controversial NYPD plainclothes unit — would flood New York City neighborhoods with cops instead of the mental health professionals Cooper knows the kids he coaches desperately need, he said.

Adams, whom Cooper met as borough president, responded to him over text.

"His pushback was, 'Barry, it's in there. That plan is in there,'" Cooper said. "What I stressed to him was, 'It is, but it's a small portion.' You led with police officers — language is important."

Cooper added, "I felt like he heard that — we’ll see what happens."

Adams' plan — which would also see 16- and 17-year-olds charged with gun possession return to criminal court — does indeed include job program expansion, mental health resources, homeless services and help for kids in the foster system.

But in the short term, it will bring at least 400 cops to the 30 precincts with the highest levels of gun violence with the revival of the anti-crime unit, which had been phased out in 2020 during a reckoning on police brutality.

Cooper isn't the only one hearing alarm bells.

Just this week, 10 organizations rallied in Harlem to call for "community investments, not more cops."

The advocates argue the return of plainclothes policing will be the return of police tactics they hold responsible for the deaths of Amadou Diallo, Eric Garner, Sean Bell and Saheed Vassell.

Adams believes his anti-crime unit will make changes to address issues of the past and, when he took to the airwaves of WNYC Friday, the mayor told New Yorkers what he'd told Cooper: people don’t talk enough about its preventive measures.

“Public safety is intervention prevention,” he said. The mayor did not return a request for comment from Patch on Cooper's stance.

The Legal Defense Fund argues that an increased police presence doesn't translate to increased public safety in neighborhoods of color, which make up the majority of areas that will see plainclothes units return.

"Merely expanding the NYPD’s footprint in targeted communities, for example, risks repeating the department’s history of unconstitutional discriminatory policing practices and surveillance during periods of intense over-policing of Black and Latino communities in the city," they said in a lengthy statement.

"It is worth remembering that the NYPD remains under a federal consent decree for discriminatory practices under earlier ‘stop and frisk’ practices meant, at its inception, to alleviate concerns about rising crime."

For Cooper, the fear is that an influx of cops could drive up tensions that lead to crime rather than ease them.

"People fear police in Black and brown communities," he said. "The moment you say you’re going to lead, come with police, that heightens the level of aggression. That heightens the level of fear."

Curbing that aggression, Cooper says, doesn't come from heavy-handed law enforcement, but by giving space early on for young men to find another path, and at least one data-based analysis backs up his belief.

A study from researcher Patrick Sharkey found that every new nonprofit focused on confronting violence or building stronger neighborhoods created a 1 percent drop in violent crime and murder.

"Imagine if we had a multitude of organizations that were fully trained and fully vetted and doing transformational work," Cooper said.

Cooper, also known as "Coach Coop," has spent more than a decade working to fulfill that goal by providing support to young men in communities of color, most recently with his BRO Experience Foundation.

Coach Coop has watched as dozens of teens who otherwise have nowhere to turn flourish simply by having a place to work on themselves. The BRO Experience includes a "Little Bro" camp for young boys and "Bro-X" workshops for teenagers, where no topic is off limits.

"When you see a young man being highly aggressive, it's desperation...someone who feels like the only way to be heard is to take a life," Cooper said. "We give them a voice and before you know it they know how to speak and show up differently."

For the BRO Experience in particular, Cooper said the key to that success is funding.

The foundation so far has been operating in Bed-Stuy's Restoration Plaza, pop-ups, local parks, school classrooms and even street corners to carry out its work, but hopes to one day have enough support to open its own dedicated space, Cooper said.

Even in those make-shift spots, the teens who join the workshops are what Cooper calls "bros for life" by the third session. They regularly reach out to him to ask when the pop-ups will return.

"Absolutely none of these spaces are our spaces — it shows you the power of our connections," he said. "Imagine if we had our own space and they walked in and felt like it belonged to them."

Cooper said Adams offered to connect him with the city's mental health officials to discuss his concerns, and, maybe, support the BRO Experience's mission.

In the meantime, Cooper will keep doing the work.

Cooper called Patch from a school in Brownsville where he runs a pilot program of his workshops. The only reason Cooper had time for the interview, he said, was because a young man who he met when he was 14 years old — now 20 — was leading the session downstairs.

"When I first met him, he had the weight of the world on his shoulders...he never talked and now he is facilitating a room of 15 young men. It works," Cooper said. "He's one of many that I have that makes me get up and do this every day."