Seeking to quell stubbornly persistent gun-related violence in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio unveils a new system for handling such cases, creating a dedicated gun court in Brooklyn and a 200-officer police division focused on gun crime.
Starting this month, those charged with possession of a firearm will be sent to one of two courtrooms in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, where two judges, Suzanne M. Mondo and Cassandra M. Mullen, will preside over arraignments, indictments and trials in hundreds of gun arrests each year.
The courts will work in conjunction with the new Gun Violence Suppression Division, which will be made up mostly of detectives and handle all police investigations related to illegal firearms, assigning a specific officer to oversee each gun case from beginning to end.
The effort will be drawn from existing court and police resources, the mayor’s office said. The only additional spending will be $2 million to the city medical examiner, starting in the 2017 fiscal year, to provide for quick testing of DNA evidence from illegal guns.
With the push, called "Project Fast Track" by City Hall, Mr. de Blasio is seeking to cement the city’s public safety gains, including a decline in shootings last year, and to address persistent unease about street crime.
The effort follows complaints last year from top police officials that some gun-toting young men seen as drivers of crime did not face jail time after arrest. A week before Mr. de Blasio’s scheduled announcement, Police Commissioner William J. Bratton described the program in a radio interview with WNYC as part of a broad effort at “drilling down” on the small universe of those responsible for shootings.
Deputy Chief James Essig, who will lead the Gun Suppression division, said he will have “experienced detectives go out and enhance the initial gun collar with video, witnesses, statements” to build “the best case possible.” He said “everything involving guns” will now be handled by the new division, including cases against interstate traffickers and violent recidivists, as well as those arrested with guns on the street.
City officials, working with the state court system, said they would be looking at whether to extend the new courts to all boroughs and each of the city’s District Attorneys. Ken Thompson, the District Attorney in Brooklyn, agreed to try the new approach first with a special team of prosecutors assigned to handle the cases.
“Dedicated judges will help us prosecute gun cases faster and more efficiently in Brooklyn,” Mr. Thompson said in a statement.
The new gun court, designed to resolve many illegal gun cases within six months, will deal with only gun possession cases, not those in which a person has been accused of opening fire in the street, officials said. Most of those charged with gun possession are young men, many of whom have never been arrested. In the current system, where young men arrested with guns are mixed with other criminal matters, many are given low bail or released on their own recognizance, a fact that has frustrated police officials who say officers are repeatedly arresting the same young men with guns.
It is not the first time the city has embarked on a dedicated court to try gun cases. A decade ago, also in Brooklyn, officials established a so-called gun court. At the time, judges were disallowing guns as evidence in many possession cases after determining that police officers did not have probable cause for their arrests or reasonable suspicion for the searches that turned up weapons. Different judges often gave sentences of less than a year.
The special court with a dedicated judge began hearing cases in 2003. But by 2009, the volume of cases had grown with the swelling of stop-and-frisk encounters, and a state law change increased the minimum sentence for possession of a loaded weapon, resulting in fewer plea deals. The special court ended in Brooklyn that year.
A 2005 study by the New York City Criminal Justice Agency found that in the Brooklyn program’s first year, it achieved the goal of speeding up cases and increasing the length of sentences. But the program also saw a decline in indictments and a rise in the number of cases dismissed in the early stages.
Dismissals increased partly because prosecutors in the program began taking a harder look at the evidence and determining themselves which cases would survive judicial scrutiny, officials said. Just over half of the gun possession cases brought citywide in 2014 resulted in a conviction, officials said. A third were dismissed, and in 10 percent of cases, district attorneys declined to prosecute. “The big challenge on these gun cases is that the officer has to be able to articulate at a hearing how they were able to find this weapon,” one law enforcement official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plan before the announcement. “Often the weapons are concealed in someone’s jacket, coat, waistband, and they have to articulate what their basis was for the approach. A lot of these cases fall on the search.”
The new court program will not affect the existing gun diversion programs in Brooklyn, which apply to a small number of gang-affiliated young men who are arrested with weapons but do not have a criminal record.
When gun cases result in prison sentences, the police intend to broadcast each instance through social media as a form of deterrence.
“We will get away from this notion that some gun cases are mere possession cases,” said Richard M. Aborn, President of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, who helped to spearhead the new approach. “When somebody makes a decision to pick up a gun, that’s like a pre-murder case.”
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