NYC - Looking Inward for Solutions to Gun Violence - NYTimes.com

In the Bronx, Looking in the Mirror for Blame, and Solutions, on Gun Violence
By CLYDE HABERMAN

The older woman sitting in church was fed up with pretty much everyone — the politicians, the clergy, the police, the district attorneys — but most of all with the gun-slinging young men who act as if the streets of the Bronx were the streets of Laredo.

“They can’t be controlled,” she complained to a younger woman near her in the Greater Faith Temple, a church occupying space that was once a movie theater on White Plains Road in Wakefield, a northern corner of the Bronx.

That’s the truth, the younger woman agreed. “They’re out of order,” she said.

That led to back and forth over where blame lay. A man joined the conversation. The three of them hauled out some of the usual suspects: The schools are failing. Programs for young people are inadequate. Housing is poor. The courts and the police don’t help. Fathers disappear. Mothers, too, sometimes. That leaves children to be raised by their grandmothers. “How do you expect a 78-year-old woman to keep up?” the man said.

But in the end, he said, all roads lead to the same place. “You know who we have to blame?” he said. “Ourselves. I don’t mean to point fingers at anybody, but it’s the truth.”

That sense of the truth brought them and about 100 others to the church the other day for a rally against gun violence. The theme could not have been simpler in concept or tougher in practice: people of the Bronx had to get control — of themselves, of their children, of their streets.

“We are sick and tired, aren’t we?” the Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr., told the audience. “We are sick and tired of being held hostage in our communities.”

After the rally, Mr. Diaz, who organized the gathering, took to the street. He and others stopped people and urged them in English and in Spanish to turn in bearers of illegal guns.

The Police Department operates a phone line, at 1-866-GUN-STOP (1-866-486-7867). On that line, people can leave anonymous tips. If the information leads to an arrest, the caller may get a $1,000 reward. This program has been around for nearly 10 years. The department says it has recovered 2,695 guns, made 4,757 arrests and handed out more than $1.6 million in reward money.

“We’ve had days of outrage and vigils and gun buybacks,” Mr. Diaz said. It was time, he said, to beat the drum more loudly for a program that provides a cash incentive. “I know there’s this business of ‘Don’t snitch,’ ” he said. But for him, naming names is doing the right thing.

“Our children are killing themselves,” he said. “We are killing ourselves.”

The grim reality is that murders have crept back up after years of decline. Reality also is that, in Wakefield as elsewhere in the city, no one is a greater threat to life and limb for young black and Hispanic men than other young black and Hispanic men.

Increasingly, New Yorkers are not comforted by reminders of how much better things are now than they were 20 years ago, when the homicide rate was outrageous — four or five times what it is today. That was then. This is now. And while the absolute numbers are not huge, reported homicides in 2010 through Sunday were nonetheless up 13 percent citywide compared with the same period last year. In the Bronx, they have risen by 18 percent. The increase for the 47th Precinct, which covers Wakefield, is 46 percent — 19 killings, as opposed to 13 a year ago.

A few terrible cases stand out, including “the day of infamy,” Mr. Diaz’s name for a burst of violence in the Bronx last month that, within a few hours, produced 9 shootings, 14 wounded and 2 dead, both teenagers.

Gloria Cruz, the Bronx chapter leader of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, was also at the church. She embraced this cause after her niece, Naiesha Pearson, was killed by a stray bullet five years ago at a Labor Day barbecue in a South Bronx playground. Naiesha was 10.

It is good that some politicians are now speaking out, Ms. Cruz said. For too long, many of them wouldn’t “because it brings negative publicity to the Bronx,” she said. All too often, church leaders have also been silent, she said, but “a lot of them are tired of doing funerals for young people.”

Can a campaign like this actually help bring the crime numbers down? What, Ms. Cruz asked, is the alternative to at least making an attempt? “We need to try to get these young people to stop fixing their problems with firearms,” she said. “People have to take responsibility.”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

NYC - Looking Inward for Solutions to Gun Violence - NYTimes.com.