This series, the latest in Amsterdam News’ Beyond the Barrel of the Gun Project, explores the policing of illegal gun possession in New York City, its impacts on targeted communities, and how community leaders are advocating for alternative approaches.
Aaliyah Guillory-Nickens, 23, is a community organizer from Harlem. Since she was a teenager, she has worked with young Black and Brown people impacted by the criminal legal system.
Doing this work has exposed her to the NYPD’s strategies to combat gun violence, efforts she sees as harmful.
“Communities that we’re in, we can’t operate on a day-to-day basis normally, because we’re under surveillance to be criminalized, not to be protected or supported or invested in,” she said.
For many years, illegal gun possession has been a particular area of focus for law enforcement. From specialized NYPD units tasked with searching for illegal guns, to new laws imposing mandatory minimum sentences for illegal gun possession, to separate courts designed to speed up gun possession cases, efforts to reduce gun violence in New York City have focused on seizing illegal guns and maximizing the punishment for those in possession of them.
Data from New York’s Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS), analyzed by the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and shared with the Amsterdam News, shows that the majority of gun-related arrests in New York City are arrests where the top charge is illegal possession, not using or firing a gun.
Between 2014 and 2024, more than 67% of firearm arrests in New York City have been for illegal possession. Illegal possession was the top charge in more than 42,700 of the 63,386 total gun-related arrests recorded.
In 2022, the NYPD reported a nearly 30-year high in gun possession arrests. The number of arrests has declined slightly since that peak, but they have remained elevated compared to the years leading up to the pandemic.
This strategy disproportionately impacts Black New Yorkers. The DCJS data shows that nearly 70% of people arrested for gun possession between 2014 and 2024 were Black, despite making up around 20% of New York City’s population.
Such statistics are not unique to New York. In 2023, The Marshall Project reported that gun possession arrests made up the majority of gun arrests in Chicago. Matt Epperson, a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Work who studies gun possession enforcement, said that these trends hold true across other U.S. cities.
“In the cities that I’ve looked at, the majority of the gun-related offenses are focused on pretty much the lowest level charge, which is illegal gun possession,” he said.
“What I have found is that that particular charge … is one of, if not the most, racially disparate charges in the criminal legal system,” he added. “Especially in cities, it is overwhelmingly young Black men who are charged with illegal gun possession.”
Epperson said that two key factors drive this racial disparity.
“Younger Black men in cities may have more likelihood of carrying guns because of safety concerns, and then they’re also at higher risk of just being in contact with the police,” Epperson explained. “Whereas a white rural population, who may also very much be participating in illegal gun possession and carrying, are less likely to be in contact with police and less likely to be charged with illegal gun possession as a result.”
The safety concerns driving gun carrying are grounded in reality. Black and Brown New Yorkers are disproportionately concentrated in under-resourced neighborhoods that see persistently high rates of violence, including Brownsville in Brooklyn and Mott Haven in the Bronx. In one study of Crown Heights youth that examined motivations for gun carrying, 76% reported being shot or shot at, and 75% said that they carried guns because they feared being killed.
Some experts say that the NYPD’s strategy of combatting gun violence by focusing on gun possession follows a similar logic to the War on Drugs, which sought to reduce drug use through increased drug possession arrests and harsher prosecution of possession offenses. Today, police patrol neighborhoods with high rates of gun violence, targeting illegal gun possession through broad proactive enforcement. Yet research consistently shows that only a small number of people are driving the gun violence in these neighborhoods.
“You cast a wide net, and in that net you get people who are not violent, who never were going to be violent, who were just kind of engaging in behavior for self-protection. You may also get in that net people who committed homicides in the community but [have] never been caught. The problem is we can’t differentiate between those two,” explained David Olson, professor and Co-Director of Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Criminal Justice.
In a statement, the NYPD defended their gun possession enforcement approach, explaining that it is part of a broader “precision policing” strategy that it credits with record lows in shootings in 2025 and 2026. (Recent declines in gun violence in New York are part of a nationwide trend, according to crime statistics).
“As of May 2026, the NYPD has removed more than 1,900 guns from city streets this year; another way the department is using precision policing to find gangs, remove guns, and keep communities safe,” a spokesperson said.
The Mayor’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on developing a more holistic approach to public safety, but has shown little indication so far of changing the city’s tough-on-gun policies.
Felipe Rodriguez, a former NYPD officer and current adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said he understands that some people in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods carry guns for protection without the intent to cause harm. Still, he said that removing guns from the street is a core element of police work.
“You always want to get guns off the street. That’s one of the basic tenets of cops. … It’s part of our job,” he said.
New York City’s enforcement strategy mirrors that of other U.S. cities located in states with strict laws around gun possession, like Chicago and Los Angeles. To carry a gun legally in New York City, one must be over 21, have no felony or serious misdemeanors, and possess a concealed carry license. Olson found that Illinois, California, and New York accounted for almost one-third of prison admissions for weapons offenses between 2018 and 2019, despite making up 22% of the U.S. population.
“Part of it is, in the states where those cities are, there are very stringent gun laws. The description I use, and it [also] applies to New York, is in Illinois, having a gun in your car while you’re driving and not having a license to do so [can carry] a mandatory prison sentence. In Indiana, that behavior is completely legal,” Olson explained.
While research has found that more strict gun carrying laws are associated with lower rates of gun violence, there is little evidence to suggest that broad increases in the enforcement of illegal gun possession reduces gun violence. Meanwhile, aggressive enforcement and punishment of gun possession in New York have fueled concerns over police misconduct, overwhelming surveillance, and unnecessary incarceration in neighborhoods experiencing high rates of gun violence.
The easy way out
Olson says the focus on gun possession stems in part from the relative difficulty police departments face in solving other types of gun crime, like nonfatal shootings and homicides. At a 2025 city council hearing, the NYPD reported that its clearance rate is around 45% for nonfatal shootings, and between 65% and 70% for murders.
“[Police are] told to address the gun violence problem, or reduce the gun violence problem. They try to investigate and solve gun homicides and gun shootings and gun robberies with relatively little success, right? But what they can do is they can look for people who are illegally possessing guns,” Olson said.
Robert Vargas, a sociology professor who studies the political economy of policing at the University of Chicago, says that focusing on illegal guns creates an achievable benchmark that politicians can point to, especially in the context of shrinking municipal resources, which makes addressing the root causes of violence more financially and politically difficult.
“It’s individual motivation, but it’s also [these] broader forces that are incentivizing people to take these kinds of easy outs, highly racialized approaches to things like gun crime, gun possession, policing, et cetera,” Vargas explained.
Weak regulation of the gun market at the federal level has also contributed to the focus on illegal gun possession in urban areas. Most of the guns recovered from crime scenes in New York City originate from states along Interstate 95 that have looser gun laws, through what’s known as the Iron Pipeline. Federal and local law enforcement data have shown that a large majority of crime guns can be traced back to a disproportionately small percentage of gun dealers.
“Whether you’re looking nationally or state by state, you can often pinpoint a very small number of dealers that are driving a lot of the crime guns that are then being recovered,” said Daniel Semenza, Director of Research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center.
But a lack of comprehensive data and weak enforcement make it difficult to identify these dealers and hold them accountable for negligent or illegal practices, like ignoring red flags of straw purchasing or not conducting background checks.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the federal agency responsible for regulating gun sales, has been hampered by years of underfunding and unstable leadership. For decades, gun retailers and gun rights activists have waged a political fight that has helped weaken the agency’s regulatory powers. The ATF only inspects about 15% of licensed gun dealers each year, meaning most dealers are visited only once every seven years.
“If you’re a gun dealer and you’re kind of flying below the radar, and…you know you’re probably not going to get inspected for another five, six, seven years, what does that look like for the practices that you engage in? … It goes back to being tied to that issue of resources and inspection, because there’s no accountability,” Semenza said.
The result is a system in which gun retailers face relatively limited oversight, while residents of struggling urban neighborhoods — especially young Black men — bear the brunt of aggressive enforcement.
Lack of effectiveness
Although police and politicians often tout the number of illegal guns recovered in a year or the number of gun arrests made, research provides limited evidence of a relationship between higher levels of incarceration for gun possession and reductions in gun violence.
In forthcoming research, Olson studied the impact of increased enforcement of illegal gun possession in Chicago, where new laws increased the likelihood of prison sentences for illegal gun possession, and arrests for illegal gun possession doubled between 2010 and 2022.
“We haven’t found anything in the research we’ve done to show that this increased level of gun enforcement in Chicago has led to any detectable change in gun violence or gun crime,” Olson said.
Studies on recidivism outcomes also cast doubt on the effects of incarceration. One study found that people released from prison after a gun offense conviction were more than twice as likely to commit another gun offense after their release, compared to people who were released from prison on a different charge. Another study focused on illegal gun possession specifically found comparable rates of committing a violent crime between people imprisoned for illegal possession and those put on probation.
“So this idea that locking folks up for illegal gun possession will change their gun carrying behavior has not been borne out in the research,” Epperson said.
Some studies have found that a specific technique, hotspot policing focused on illegal gun possession, can reduce gun violence in targeted areas, though these effects are often short-term and largely limited to the intervention areas.
There are also myriad negative consequences associated with aggressive enforcement.
“What [police] elect to do in terms of hotspot policing or stop-and-frisk can obviously create tension within the community, particularly if they arrest people who illegally possess a gun, and the community knows that that young person is not someone who’s driving violence. They’re just a person who’s probably carrying a gun for self-protection. So the community can start seeing this as broad enforcement, as rounding up the wrong people, or punishing the wrong people,” Olson explained.
Some research suggests that these aggressive strategies can have the opposite of their intended effect, creating an alienation between residents and police that contributes to decisions to carry guns illegally.
Melissa Barragan, a professor of Sociology at Cal Poly Pomona, has interviewed people incarcerated for illegal gun possession. She found that feeling unsafe was one motivation for gun carrying and that negative interactions with police sparked or amplified this fear.
“Not only have I been harassed by police,” Barragan said about the mindset of those she interviewed, “but now I have folks in my community that are making me feel unsafe. I can’t go to the police to protect me, because clearly they haven’t been interested in protecting me. They’ve only been interested in harassing me. I’m going to do what I need to do, which is, oftentimes, illegally carry a gun.”
In New York City, these policing tactics have also led to constitutional challenges, as advocates and community members contend that the NYPD has trampled on the rights of residents in their rush to get guns off the street.
The NYPD is facing civil rights lawsuits about its gang database and its vehicle search policy, while it remains under federal monitorship after its stop-and-frisk policies were found to be unconstitutional in 2013.
Guillory-Nickens said the NYPD’s continued use of stop-and-frisk and the gang database generates fear and anxiety among the community members she works with.
“Before NYPD even comes into communities, there’s already a negative connotation attached to them because of how they operate,” she explained. “They come in very violently. They don’t build community; they don’t speak to community members. And on top of that, now when they’re stopping and frisking people based off of nothing, that damages the relationship further, and it makes young people feel that they’re at odds with the police.”
The next article in this series will explore community impact.
