BY SAM SPOKONY | Police recently took 50-guns-off the street at the Lower East Side’s first-ever-gun-buyback event.
Local elected officials and community leaders had called on the Manhattan district attorney and the Police Department to bring the program – which has been used in other crime-heavy areas of the city – to their neighborhood after a recent surge in shootings.
At a press conference held during the Oct. 28 event, District Attorney Cy Vance said that the-gun-buyback would be instrumental in curbing-handgun-violence, which has led to 154 people being shot in Manhattan so far this year, 19 of them fatally.
“There is literally nothing more important than getting-guns-off our streets, out of our communities, and out of the hands of kids,” Vance said. “And programs like this will help to prevent future shootings.”
At the buyback event, which was held in the Rutgers Houses Community Center at Madison and Rutgers Sts., local residents were able to give away working handguns – anonymously and with no questions asked – in exchange for a $200 bank card. Rifles and shotguns were also accepted, and could be exchanged for a $20 bank card.
The event was held by the Seventh Precinct, which has jurisdiction over most of the Lower East Side.
Nearly all of the 50-guns-received on Oct. 28 were handguns, including 30 revolvers and 14 semi-automatic pistols, police said.
Of the semi-automatics, police added, four had been altered – including one that had been fitted with a threaded barrel to hold a silencer – and one was a TEC-9, a model that was made in the ’80s and early ’90s and is commonly used by criminals because it is easy to convert into a fully automatic weapon.
The press conference was held inside the Seward Park Community Center, next door to the public housing development where Police Officer Brian Groves was shot in July while patrolling a building. Groves’s bulletproof vest saved his life, but the shooter has yet to be identified.
Vance and the politicians in attendance – Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Councilmember Margaret Chin – mentioned the attack on Groves several times, and also noted the fatal-shooting-of Charles Fernandez several weeks ago outside a barbershop on Forsyth St.
“In each of those incidents, innocent members of the general public were put in harm’s way, and it’s because we have too many-guns-on our streets,” Silver said. “When so many people are carrying-guns, no one is safe, not children, not adults, not families, no one.”
Also attending the event were Gigi Li and Susan Stetzer, the chairperson and district leader, respectively, of Community Board 3.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was scheduled to attend the press conference, but could not show up because of the department’s preparations for Hurricane Sandy, which struck the next day. In a statement released on Mon., Oct. 29, Kelly said that voluntary-gun-buybacks – along with police stops and undercover operations – are a key part of why the city is on track for a new record low in murders this year, despite the Lower East Side’s recent uptick in-gun-violence.
John Rhea, chairperson of the New York City Housing Authority, who was expected to attend, was also absent due to storm preparations – and while he certainly had good reason to be elsewhere, one community leader thought Rhea should have at least made his presence felt, in an area of public housing that has been struggling with safety issues this year.
“[Rhea] should’ve at least sent a representative,” said Mike Steele, who has been the tenant association president of Rutgers Houses for the past seven years. Steele’s development is still waiting for two of its five buildings to receive much-needed and long-awaited security cameras, and Steele added that NYCHA may simply be waiting for backlash over that issue to blow over.
“I think NYCHA didn’t want to send anybody because they thought they were gonna get railroaded,” Steele said. “With all this stuff that’s been going on with them, with the cameras, and with all the elected officials there today, they thought they were gonna get hammered.”
None of the people who handed in-guns-at the Oct. 28 buyback on Essex St. wanted to comment on why they were doing so.
Most looked nervous as they entered and exited the community center. One man paced back and forth on the sidewalk, scoping out the area to see if anyone was watching him, while talking on his cell phone and then getting picked up by a friend who had been parked down the block.
Alex Lugo, 25, who has lived in Rutgers Houses all his life, was passing by the-gun-buyback event and said he firmly believed the process couldn’t really be totally anonymous.
“They’re going to take their names somehow, or get some other information, and I think they’re really doing this just so they can put the stats in their database, in order to figure out how to monitor the area and who to watch for,” Lugo explained.
But while he disagreed with the method, he added that he thought the overall idea was positive, and he acknowledged that the motives are good.
“In the end,” Lugo said, “the cops just want a safer neighborhood, and so do we.”
