“There’s this idea that Black people don’t care about gun violence, that Black people only care about a killing when the cop is the triggerman,” says seasoned journalist and first-time author Josiah Bates. “I want to kill this narrative.”
That is where Bates is most effective in his book, In These Streets: Reporting from the Front Lines of Inner-City Gun Violence, released last week. Through his reporting, Bates traveled the country and conducted more than 300 interviews to uncover the impact of gun violence as it surged in marginalized communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The book takes most of its material from New York City, and Brooklyn in particular. Bates grew up in Brownsville and draws on his and his family’s experiences being exposed to gun violence. One of the book’s central sources, Roy Alfonso (a pseudonym used to protect his identity), grew up in neighboring Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Roy’s story acts as an important anchor for the book, which at times abruptly transitions the reader to different epicenters across the country. His journey from committing gun violence in his youth to becoming a violence interrupter after two decades in prison encapsulates key themes in the book: how Black boys and men get caught up gun violence, the strained relationship between police and residents of poor Black neighborhoods, and how a key part of the solution to gun violence must come from communities themselves.
A multitude of solutions
Bates explained that the impetus for the book came while he was reporting on the 2020 rise in gun violence for Time magazine.
“A lot of conversations I was having with community activists and leaders was just them saying, ‘We know what needs to be done to address this, we should have addressed this by now, we should have a handle on this by now,’” he said.
In addition to highlighting individual stories, Bates sought to highlight the solutions. He identified an emerging consensus around four main issues to confront.
“Most people agree: we need to address the poverty factor. The police, whatever role they have, it can’t just be targeting entire neighborhoods, [they] have to be very strategic. We have to figure out some way to stop the flow, or at least lessen the flow of guns into these communities. And we need the community itself to be part of that,” he explained.
Bates dedicates a significant portion of the book to fleshing out these ideas. One chapter describes how lax gun laws and weak enforcement at the federal and state levels fuel the flow of illegal guns into communities. Thus, states like New York that have strict gun laws must contend with guns trafficked from states with looser laws. Bates argues that enacting stronger gun regulations like universal background checks, and empowering enforcement agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, can help restrict the amount of trafficked guns that make their way to neighborhoods.
Throughout the book, Bates also highlights how poverty and systemic disinvestment drive gun violence in poor Black neighborhoods. This economic insecurity causes some residents to turn to illegal activity and carry guns, fueling violent conflict. Even as gun violence declined in New York and other cities across the country in the early 2000s, poverty and residential segregation persisted. Bates argues that the failure to address these underlying factors meant these neighborhoods were primed for a spike in violence when the pandemic plunged more residents into poverty and weakened neighborhoods’ social fabric.
“The city never addressed poverty, never addressed the structural issues that exist. And if you never address those, you might have some period of time where gun violence ebbs and flows…but it’s just set up where it can go back up again. That’s what we saw around 2015, and that’s definitely what we saw in 2020.”
For Bates, this is proof that any lasting solution to gun violence requires addressing structural inequality.
“The government [at both the local and federal levels] needs to commit to improving these communities on a large scale. It needs to properly fund the schools, improve the hospitals, and fix the blocks with vacant houses, stores, and lots,” he writes, adding that such investments must be made for the benefit of the existing residents, rather than as a way to fuel gentrification.
But Bates recognizes that this solution will take time. He turns to law enforcement practices and community-based programs as solutions that can generate results within a shorter time frame.
The role of policing
In addition to the pandemic, the killing of George Floyd and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests sparked a major upheaval during the summer of 2020. Bates doesn’t pull any punches as he illustrates the harm that police have caused in the Black community. From stop-and-frisk policies that target entire neighborhoods, to corrupt departments, to police brutality, he demonstrates how police mistreatment of people in poor Black neighborhoods contributes to cycles of violence.
These protests brought more attention to community violence intervention, a strategy through which community-based organizations, like the one Roy works at, provide resources and mentoring to people likely to engage in violence. Bates argues for continued funding of these efforts, which have yielded promising results in many cities across the country, including New York.
Some activists have highlighted community violence intervention as a way to address violence without involving the police. But Bates criticizes efforts to eliminate police from the conversation on gun violence entirely, explaining that many of the people he spoke to did not want to see police removed from their communities.
“It’s not an either or thing, where it’s either we have the police and they’re violating people’s civil rights and terrorizing communities, or we don’t have the police at all,” he said. “I think most people understand it’s somewhere in the middle. Right now, the way society is set up, the police are going to be here. There’s no political will to get rid of the police, and that’s not what people in communities want anyway, so how can we have them be most effective [while] having the most minimum harm?”
To make law enforcement part of the solution to gun violence, Bates argues that police departments must adopt strategies that focus specifically on the small number of people committing violence, while ending stop-and-frisk policies that antagonize whole communities. These strategies include focused deterrence, which targets those involved in violence, or hot-spot policing, which targets particular areas where violence frequently occurs. Politicians must commit to ensuring that police departments implement these strategies, Bates says.
“I can’t see it happening in a large-scale way for a while, until these city leaders really hold [police] accountable. That’s what it’s going to take,” he said.
Still, there are proponents of police and prison abolition involved in anti-gun violence work. Aside from a mention of Alex Vitale’s book The End of Policing, though, Bates doesn’t feature any of these advocates. His vision for strategic policing as a solution to gun violence would have benefited from a more thorough engagement with the abolitionist critique of policing.
For example, abolitionists advocate for developing responses to those who perpetuate harm that don’t involve incarceration, arguing that the conditions of imprisonment only fuel violent behavior. But the police strategies Bates proposes rely on the use of incarceration.
At one point in the book, Bates touches on this issue through a quote from Roy, who explains that he views the police as necessary enforcers who can get a person with a gun off the street by arresting them. But he questions whether incarceration is the appropriate response: “Should that kid be sent to prison for a mandatory minimum sentence, or do we put them in a program and try to redirect their behavior and redirect their thinking? Do we try to teach those kids or just lock them up?” he asks.
This question opens up an opportunity to consider alternatives to a police response to gun violence, which necessarily involves incarceration. Instead, Bates sets the issue aside as a “different and necessary discussion,” before concluding that “there are violent criminals in these communities who simply need to be off the streets.”
Overall, In These Streets provides informative reporting on the human impact of gun violence, and the causes and proposed solutions to this crisis. But the limited analysis of the police abolition debate might leave readers wanting more.
Shannon Chaffers is a Report for America corps member and writes about gun violence for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.