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Community Corner

Anti-Gun Rally Calls for End to Violence

An anti-gun rally was held in Crown Heights on Thursday evening, to pay respects to Denise Gay and condemn violence in the community

Over a hundred local residents gathered at the corner of Park Place and Franklin Avenue Thursday evening to commemorate the life of Denise Gay and to condemn gun violence.

Ms. Gay, 56, was killed by a stray bullet between Leroy Webster, 32, and police. 

The firefight, which left two dead and injured two police officers, was but one incident in a weekend filled with tragedy. Violence broke out all over the city as fifty-two shootings accounted for thirteen deaths.

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“This is a call for a cease fire,” said City Council Member Letitia James, speaking just a few feet from the apartment steps where Ms. Gay lost her life. “To lay down the guns and to live. To respect one another and respect someone else.”

The anti-gun rally, which was sponsored by Council Member James, the Crow Hill Community Association and Save Our Streets Crown Heights, included emotional remarks by nearly a dozen political and religious leaders, including Reverend Jerry West of the Mount Moriah Church, State Senator Eric Adams, and State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries. 

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Ife Charles, representing the community-organizing group Save Our Streets Crown Heights, compared violence to an infectious disease.  

“This is a disease and it’s spreading pretty quickly,” she said. “It is up to every single one of us out here [to find a cure]. Some of us are gonna go back inside and we’re gonna close our doors and we’re gonna forget. But there’s a spirit that was killed, and there are many spirits within our universe that are being killed by guns. We need to stop the madness and understand that there’s a cure.”

Nearly every speaker referenced the decades of violence that the Crown Heights neighborhood endured.

“I grew up here in Crown Heights…and I came of age at a time when the crack epidemic had hits this community extremely hard,” said State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries. “So I remember the days of 2000 homicides in the city of New York, and exponentially more shootings than that… Last year I believe there was only 500 homicides in the city of New York. But that’s still 500 homicides too many.

“What we witnessed this past weekend gave many of us in the Crown Heights community flashbacks to what we hope to never see again,” he added. “So we are here today as black and whites. We’re here today as Christians, Muslims and Jews. We’re here today as the wealthy and the well off, and working families. We’re here today as old and young. We’re here today as police officers and civilians to make sure that we do everything possible to stop the violence and increase the peace.” 

As he continued, Assemblyman Jeffries said that the nation’s economic troubles have had disastrous consequences for the inner city.

“The truth is we have unsustainable levels of unemployment among young black and Latino men who do not have any productive things to do, and don’t even have any hope. Some fraction of those individuals might find themselves engaging in the destructive patters that result in the type of violence that we saw this past weekend.”

In her address, Council Member James also called on the city and state to devote funds to combating unemployment among black and Latino men.

“I’m asking that both the local and state government to redirect funds from the New York City housing authority that go directly to NYPD to go to communities where there’s high rates of violence, and that the black male initiative that the mayor recently announced be redirected to organizations on the ground such as Crown Heights Mediation, and SOS, and Man Up,” she said.

Notably absent from the speeches was any reference to recent reports that Ms. Gay was most likely killed by one of the many bullets fired by NYPD officers during the shootout, which started between two men in front of an apartment building but quickly poured out into the street.

Several of the speakers encouraged cooperation between community members and police, saying that silence and suspicion would only prevent investigators from doing their jobs in this and future criminal investigations. 

But one audience member, holding an infant in his arms, shouted questions at the speakers regarding the police’s involvement in the shooting and asked why the NYPD doesn’t have better firearms training for its officers.

Watching the rally from a distance, longtime Crown Heights resident Cheryl Banfield also expressed wariness about the proceedings.

“People die in the neighborhood all the time, and there isn’t a rally,” she said. “Why is there one now? We’ve seen an increased police presence, but it didn’t do anything in this situation. They fired 50 shots [sic].”

“This is another Amadou Diallo situation,” she added, referencing the famous NYPD profiling case that provoked outrage across the country.

For the most part, however, the mood was somber and reflective. As dusk fell, community members joined hands in prayer and lit candles in remembrance of Ms. Gay. Following the speeches, a group of family and friends gathered on her stoop in front of a makeshift memorial.

Speaking towards the end of the rally, State Senator Eric Adams summed up the hopes of everyone by expressing optimism that peace would endure in Crown Heights.

“I don’t want my community to go back to all out violence,” he said. “Those days are over.”

Related Topics: Shooting, Shootings, Violence, and anti-gun rally

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