Pols Sound Alarm On Gun Violence After Crown Heights Shooting

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — Deadly gun violence in majority-black neighborhoods is a crisis that shouldn't be accepted as commonplace, local politicians said Monday in the wake of a quadruple homicide in Crown Heights.

"People often ask, ‘Why do we have these vigils when a horrific shooting like this takes place. We are not going to normalize violence," said Borough President Eric Adams at a vigil in Crown Heights. "We are not going to allow a mass shooting to happen in our community and just flip over the page and act like it did not happen. Every time we come out like this we are saying we will never accept violence."

"Four people were shot and killed here over the weekend, but even when the bullet strikes the body, it continues to emotionally travel and traumatize and rip apart the anatomy of our community, and we feel the pain."

The vigil comes after four men were shot dead and three other people were injured in a mass shooting early Saturday morning at a social club Triple Aces. The space at 74 Utica Ave. had for years been used as a night club, records show.

Across the street from where the shooting took place, anti-gun violence advocates, local oficcials and other mourners gathered to pray and sound the alarm about the scourge of shootings in neighborhoods like Crown Heights, where in 2019 records show shootings are up nearly 43 percent in the neighborhood's 77th Precinct.

“I don’t know how many people must be shot in communities of color before we start identifying that we have an overproliferation of guns in our community, and it needs to be addressed in rapid fashion," said Adams, a Democratic 20201 mayoral candidate.

While public discourse and policy proposals focus on assault rifles, hand guns are more often the weapons of choice in shootings in urban areas, Adams noted. And more broadly, shootings in black areas don't receive the as much outrage and public policy response as in whiter, suburban areas, the borough president argued.

"When you have shootings of this magnitude that occur in the suburban counties of this country and this state, you see all the resources come. But here, in Crown Heights, in Brownsville, in South Jamaica, Queens … we normalize the violence and say the people here are used to violence. No we are not. We are not used to violence," he said. “We’re out here because we don’t have to wait until a community is gentrified before we start to understand that lives matter in the community."

Council Member Robert Cornegy, who represents northern Crown Heights, echoed Adams.

"Violence, and gun violence in particular, is a public health issue," he said. "We have to change the language in order to bring the resources to the community."