A long-awaited city report shared exclusively with Gothamist provides new information about what types of illegal guns police are seizing and where.
The data comes after the New York City Council passed a bill in 2022 requiring the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and the NYPD to report annually on all the guns police seized in a given year, including whether a gun was connected to a crime, where the gun came from and whether the person who sold it was licensed.
The inaugural report’s goal was to learn more about the weapons driving gun violence in the city and find ways to prevent it. Here are five takeaways from the data.
Most of the guns seized were not connected to a crime
The report examines 6,242 firearms police seized between July 2020 and December 2021. About a third of them had been used in a crime and about two-thirds had not. The guns that had not been used in a crime included those seized from people who didn’t have a license to possess a firearm, and weapons that people voluntarily turned over to law enforcement at gun buybacks.
Most of the guns connected to a crime came from precincts with high gun violence rates
Police seized the most guns connected to crimes from the NYPD precincts encompassing Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn. During the reporting period, officers took 154 firearms used in crimes from the 73rd Precinct in Brownsville and 131 from the 75th Precinct in East New York, according to NYPD data.
Brownsville and East New York are priority precincts for the city’s Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, which is working to reduce shootings in several neighborhoods with the highest rates of shootings. The four other precincts the task force is focusing on — the 40th, 42nd, 44th and 47th Precincts in the Bronx — also ranked high for seizures of guns connected to crimes.
The other precincts where police seized the most such guns were the 67th, 71st, 77th and 81st in Brooklyn. Those precincts include East Flatbush, Crown Heights and…
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