Keeping Bullets Out of Beefs: Stopping Gun Violence in Brooklyn

While most of us were sipping our mid-afternoon cup of coffee on Wednesday, two people were getting shot on a Brooklyn street. The 3 p.m. gunplay at a corner in East New York frequented by kids getting out of school is the kind of incident that has over the past year generated sensational headlines, political sniping and questions about how crime statistics are kept.

The primary impact of the death of one young man in yesterday’s violence won’t be on the COMPSTAT numbers, however. As is the case each time a bullet hits someone, it will be on the little world that surrounded that victim.

“Every time a gunshot happens, the people, the perpetrators, think about the beef with that individual. But it causes this ripple effect across a whole community,” Joe Herrera, the co-chair of the Coney Island Anti-Violence Collaborative told BRIC-TV’s “BK Live” on Wednesday, when he was joined by City Councilmember Jumaane Williams and Save Our Streets Crown Heights program manager David Gaskin to discuss the state of gun violence and efforts to stop it in Brooklyn.

Guns are a hot topic nationally as well as in the city. A lot of that talk rightly focuses on systemic problems, like gun trafficking. Simultaneously, however, there is new attention to the personal roots and consequences of violence. Hence Mayor de Blasio’s call for gun courts to focus on uniquely destructive offenders and the work that Herrera and Gaskins do to defuse potentially deadly disputes one beef at a time.

Check the video below.