This story, the third in our series about the enforcement of illegal gun possession in New York City, explores community-based violence intervention as an alternative to aggressive gun possession enforcement.
MelQuan Thawney speaks from experience. Growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, he was subjected to the full spectrum of police strategies designed to address gun violence.
“Enforcement without investment doesn’t work. The young adults — they need pathways and not punishment,” said Thawney, 32.
One of Thawney’s first memories of being stopped by police occurred when he was around 14 years old. He was biking through his neighborhood when he noticed an undercover police car following him.
“As I started riding faster, they started to chase me, and I stopped, and [the officers] jumped out and [started] aggressively manhandling me, asking me, ‘Where’s the gun at, where’s the gun at?,’” he recalled.
From that point on, Thawney began to view the police as bullies in his neighborhood.
“I’m supposed to feel safe when I see police officers … [but] I just grew up disliking them because of the continued harassment,” he said.
When he was 17, Thawney was arrested on an illegal gun possession charge. As he tells it, he and a group of neighbors were gathered outside on a hot summer day when police showed up.
“The whole block started paying attention to what was going on with the cops — that they started chasing people,” he said.
Eventually, the police searched someone’s car and found a gun. Neither the gun nor the car were Thawney’s, but he just happened to be standing closest to the vehicle.
“The car wasn’t mine. I was too young to have a car,” he explained. “[The officers] literally looked around [and said], ‘You,’ pointed to me, ‘You come here … turn around, put your arms behind your back.’”
An arrest based on a person’s proximity to a weapon can be lawful under the doctrine of constructive possession if officers have probable cause to believe the individual knew about the weapon, and the ability and intent to exercise control over it.
After that arrest, Thawney was held on Rikers Island awaiting the outcome of his case, because his family couldn’t afford bail. Thawney said he wasn’t knowledgeable enough about the legal process to challenge the charge. He pled guilty to criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree. He was granted youthful offender status, and received a sentence of six months in jail and five years on probation.
“I just wanted to come home, so I pled [guilty],” Thawney said. “That right there started my cycle of repeating the same thing.”’
Breaking the cycle
After his arrest, Thawney’s hopes of attending Rutgers University on a football scholarship fell apart. Instead, he began cycling in and out of prison for various charges, including for illegal gun possession. This time, Thawney was in possession of a gun.
“I carried [a gun] out of fear, because I lost close friends at a young age due to gun violence. I lost family members due to gun violence,” he said.
Thawney also suspects that he was placed on the NYPD’s gang database, because he received a letter as part of the NYPD’s Ceasefire program, a gun violence suppression initiative. The NYPD has said that they use the database as a starting point for including people in the program. Thawney believes that he and a group of friends who made music together were wrongly identified as a gang. “It was more so like a friendship, like a brotherhood, just a group of kids growing up,” he said.
Spending time in prison gave Thawney time to reflect on his decisions, but going back to his neighborhood made it difficult to change his habits.
“I learned my lesson every time I got locked up, but it was the environment. I felt like [just] because I changed that [didn’t] mean that my environment changed,” he said. “I was released back into a community that really didn’t have any type of resources at the time, or had people like myself nowadays — credible messengers and people [who] mediate conflict to help navigate our lives to something better.”
Turning a corner
Thawney is now working to ensure that the next generation does not feel that they have to make the same choices as he did. After his girlfriend and father died during his last stint in prison in 2024, he committed to making a change.
“I was going through this experience where I had no control over my situation, and I just vowed that I wouldn’t want to be placed in a situation like this ever again,” he said.
For the past year, Thawney has worked in community-based violence prevention for the Brooklyn nonprofit Camba, which has operated for nearly 50 years. He started as a violence interrupter for Brownsville In Violence Out (BIVO). BIVO is part of the city’s Crisis Management System, a network of community-based organizations who employ credible messengers to mediate conflict and connect at-risk youth to services.
In April, Thawney started working as a peer advocate for Camba’s Project Restore Brownsville, a violence intervention initiative supported by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office that provides intensive mentorship to members of two rival groups in Brownsville. “The goal is to … change the community from looking at each other as enemies to looking at each other as neighbors,” Thawney explained.
Last summer, Thawney also started his own organization, Save the Next Generation, with a fellow violence interrupter whom he once considered a rival. He hopes the organization can build community and give youth a safe space to be themselves and fulfill their potential.
“When we invest in youth, conflict mediation, community-led solutions, we save lives,” he said.
Community-based solutions grow, but the NYPD dominates
In the past decade, the community-based strategies that Thawney promotes have grown in prominence. The city’s Crisis Management System (CMS) has seen investment increase from $4.8 million per year in 2012 to nearly $100 million per year today.
“The dominant approach of the city remains one of criminalization through surveillance, harassment, arrest, mass prosecutions,” said Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project. “However, there has been growing political pressure over the last 10 years, slightly more, to invest in alternative strategies.”
Germain Thompson leads the Office of the Community Liaison, an independent office that works alongside the NYPD Federal Monitor and tracks community members’ concerns about the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk. He said that any community members value the more collaborative nature of these non-police strategies.
“A lot of the community members feel more safe with the CMS sites, and … being able to work closely with them to be able to drive down shootings within their own communities, because these folks look like them. When they engage with police officers around ‘stop, question, and frisk,’ they don’t feel safe. Most feel targeted,” Thompson said.
Anthony Posada, supervising attorney of the Legal Aid Society’s Community Justice Unit, which provides legal services to CMS organizations, contrasted the work of CMS groups to the NYPD’s gang database.
“I have seen CMS groups go into neighborhoods, have such strong connections with the youth and the people [who] are at risk of committing gun violence there, that they can step in and intervene before something happens. I’ve seen de-escalations. I’ve seen mediations in real-time happening, and I can tell you that they’re not relying on a database, especially not the NYPD gang database,” he said.
While measuring the causal effects of the CMS system is difficult, researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at the NYC Comptroller’s office have found that these CMS sites have contributed to reductions in gun violence. In addition, researchers at Columbia University found that Project Restore BedStuy, a precursor to Project Restore Brownsville, was associated with a 28% reduction in shooting incident victims.
Although investment in community-based violence prevention has grown, aggressive policing continues to affect young people.
Mikeyy Williams, 25, was a participant in Project Restore BedStuy in 2023. He said the program gave him the support and encouragement to make a better life for himself after serving time in jail for grand larceny.
“They showed me a way where I don’t have to go outside and go steal,” Williams said.
However, Williams said he and his friends continue to be harassed by police when they hang out together.
“We want to be better people and better men … the program showed us a lot. It’s just [that] the cops now … just think we still the same people. I don’t know [why]. Because we chill together as a group, still? [There’s] nothing wrong with that. We’re friends. We’re from the neighborhood,” he said.
The encounters continue to spark a mixture of frustration and sadness for him.
“I’m angry because … we keep [having to] go through this. We’ve been going through this [during] our childhood. Now we’re adults, so it’s like, when is this gonna stop? And it makes me more sad, because we got younger people who are gonna grow up to be young men, and what are y’all gonna do? Y’all gonna do the same thing to them?”
