Amid Shooting Surge, NYC Partners With Feds In Anti-Gun Effort

New York City NY

08 June, 2021

12:07 PM

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NEW YORK CITY — On the day Queens youth Justin Wallace would have turned 11 if not for shooter's bullet, city officials unveiled a new partnership with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives aimed at curbing gun violence. ATF agents will embed directly into the NYPD and city cops, likewise, will be deputized to work under the cover of federal law in an effort Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday. De Blasio explicitly tied the effort to the city's recovery from the coronavirus pandemic — a process many prominent critics have said is threatened by a yearlong surge in gun violence. "I've said many times, recovery will help the city become safer," de Blasio said. "Recovery equals public safety, public safety equals recovery." Mayor Bill de Blasio provided details Tuesday on a new partnership between the NYPD and ATF. (NYC Mayor's Office) The partnership will team NYPD and ATF agents together in a broad effort to stop the flow of illegal guns into New York City — a pipeline that de Blasio has blamed for the recent surge in shootings, which last month were 73 percent higher than the year before. All available information on guns used in shootings will be pooled and used to "disrupt the shooting cycle," said John DeVito, the ATF's special agent-in-charge for New York. He said it will simultaneously find out how those guns are taken from the legal marketplace and turned toward criminal pursuits. "And for those offenders specifically, it's not a matter of if, but when we will come calling," he said. Every gun, every bullet, every shell casing tells a story, said John Miller, the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence & Counterterrorism. ATF technology will help investigators bring those stories to light, he said. "We talk about the stray bullets — there are no stray bullets," he said. "There are stray dogs, but every bullet has an owner and that's the person who fired that shot and those are our targets in the city." Both DeVito and Miller flanked de Blasio for the announcement. Notably absent was NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea, who has presided over the surge in violence. De Blasio, facing a barrage of tough questions why his top cop wasn't present, said crime went up in cities across the country. "Commissioner Shea is leading the way on so many of these pieces," he said.