$9.1 Million Secured in State Budget Extends Last Year's Emergency Increase to Support Nearly 150 Gun Violence Prevention and Intervention Staff
$2 Million in Community Violence Intervention Act Funding Awarded to Queens Nonprofit to Address Needs of Victims and Families Affected by Gun Violence
$2.5 Million for the Office of Gun Violence Prevention within the State Department of Health to Fund Data Analysis, Interagency Coordination, and Public Awareness
State's Exhaustive Efforts to Combat Gun Violence Contributing to Substantial Drop in Year-over-Year Shooting Incidents, Data Available Here
Governor Hochul: "We have a gun violence epidemic here in the state of New York, full stop, that is a statement of fact. It's a public health crisis how do you stop public health crisis? You find the source of it, the virus, how you treat the virus. And you disrupt it and you stop the transmission and it's, that's the plan."
Hochul: "We have to help people. And that's what we're doing. I want kids to be able to go out and play safely. I want kids to ride their bikes. I want moms to push strollers. I want kids that just feel like they're going to be okay. And how are they going to feel okay? Programs like yours, programs like this all over our city and our state."
Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul announced $13.6 million to fight gun violence, aid victims and survivors and their families and communities, and bolster the state's response to the ongoing public health crisis in communities that have experienced significant increases in shootings and firearm-involved crimes since early 2020. A total of $9.1 million will allow the state to continue supporting more than 30 nonprofit organizations and hospitals, so they can deploy gun violence intervention staff through 2023; $2 million will address the needs of victims, families and communities affected by violence in Queens; and $2.5 million will fund the state's Office of Gun Violence Prevention's public awareness and data analysis work.
VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.
AUDIO of the event is available here.
PHOTOS of the event will be available on the Governor's Flickr page.
A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:
Good morning, everyone. Boy, it's great to be back in Brownsville. It's not my first visit here. Latrice Walker makes sure I come. Feels like every month we're here, so don't tell all the other colleagues. All right, but I know you love this community, so I'm first of all, happy to be joined by a superstar in public life.
She comes to Albany with this depth of passion for her beliefs that is just so inspiring to all of us in government. And you're a real fighter for your district. My great friend, your assemblymember, Latrice Walker. Let's give her round applause.
And to Valerie, I thank you for all you do here at CAMBA. This is just a place that people can walk into and have their lives literally transformed. And that is powerful. That is a reminder of the individual power we all have to give hope to others. And I thank you for being the place where people gather and share their thoughts, but also go out into the streets, take it to the streets, go where people are and let them know they can have a different outcome in light. So, Valerie Barton-Richardson, the Chief Administrative Officer of CAMBA. Let's give you another round of applause.
Anthony Newerls, I want to thank him for his work Brownsville In Violence Out, BIVO. I like the sound, BIVO. That sounds like a fun bar or something. I want to thank you, Anthony, for your life story, how you've harnessed your desire to help others in such an impactful way. And to all of you who are part of BIVO Brooklyn In Violence Out. I love that. I mean Brownsville Well, it could be Brooklyn too.
We'll say Brownsville and Brooklyn In Violence Out. You know, it's extraordinary all the individuals I had a chance to say hello to beforehand. How you all come from different experiences, but you all came here for a common purpose. And in some of your cases, your common purpose may be to stop others from having the experience you had, right?
You don't have to do this. This is not your destiny. It's not preordained that when you grow up on a block or in a neighborhood that this is where you're going to end up, right? So, it is that power in those stories and those personal connections that only you can give to people that I can't. I can fund you, but I will not have be the same credible messenger out there that they need to hear from.
And that is how we're making a difference. So, to all of you who sometimes say, you know, we don't quite see the end of the line. Did we really make a difference? Was this worthwhile? The answer is yes because you're touching people in a way, perhaps when they're younger, impressionable, when they're looking at two paths, do I go this route which is more common? I'm used to this. My older brother, my cousins, they're all kind of in this area. You know, whether it's the family that a gang offers them, the gang experience, or just feeling like what have I got to lose? Why not go this path.
And then to offer the other path, finish your education, get some training, get a job. Think about yourself as having a family someday and giving back, getting involved in your church and your community. You can also show them that path. You're not going to know all the people who took that path, but I'm telling you they're doing it because of what you're doing. I wanted to reinforce that to all of you here today. So to all of you at BIVO, Brownsville In Violence Out.
I also have passionate leaders who work with me every single day. Rossana, Rosado, our former Secretary of State. It's not like she's out there negotiating peace in the Middle East or something, but sometimes it's almost the same challenge, peace in New York. But she did a fabulous job there, but she's our New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. And when I became Governor less than a year ago, she is such a rockstar, I said, "You can have any job you want, except mine." And I said, "Where's your passion? Where's your heart? What do you want to do?" And she wanted to be involved in reshaping the whole criminal justice experience for people and giving them hope. So Rossana Rosado, I want to thank you for all the work that you do.
Another person you're all familiar with, Calliana Thomas, our Director of Gun Violence Prevention. If I have any talents, it's a talent for picking the best people. Would you agree with that? Okay. So, her experience working with New York City, going from six to 22 facilities and ramping them up and saying, "This is how we're going to make a difference." We can't be sitting in an office downtown thinking about these problems and maybe throwing money here or there, we have to get to the streets. We have to set up organizations where people live. So I want to thank you for being one of the early pioneers of this effort, but now we harness your talents statewide. And so I'm so grateful of the work you do.
And then, of course, Elizabeth Cronin, the Director of the Office of Victim Services. Elizabeth, another individual who has the heart and compassion to help people who've seen the worst in life. These random acts of violence, sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's the wrong place at the wrong time, you're caught in the crossfire, you're on the subway at the wrong time. So there's a lot of pain out there. So you need empathetic people who can relate to that. And Elizabeth, you and the team you lead are really are making a difference every single day.
So as I've said, many, many times as Governor, number one job: Keep people safe. For a long time, it's safe from COVID, we're working on that still. Safe protecting their health, but also safe from violence, because everybody has a human right to live in safety. And not to have fear, because fear is paralyzing. Am I right about that? It's debilitating. And I think about people in neighborhoods here, senior citizens, who are aware of an incident down the block, "Well, I don't want to go out now. I'm afraid to go to my doctor appointment. I'm afraid to go to the store. I'm afraid to go see my family." Fear is an emotion that can take people down. And that's what happens when there's gun violence in a neighborhood, in a community. Some people become desensitized to it, reading about it, "Oh, another shooting, another shooting." But if you're living here, you can't escape it. You can't turn the page of the newspaper and read a different story. This is your story you're living with every single day. So let's accept that reality, and know that we have to do something about it.
So as Governor, I'm constantly pushing my team, talking to experts, talking to people in the field. What else can we be doing at the state level? And I have found one of those answers and it is investing in organizations like this, and saying, you are the people I need to help turn this around and bring back that right that we all have to live without fear to live in safety, to raise kids and families and start a business. And make a place like Brownsville be the best it can be. That's what we're doing. That's why we're doing this.
So we have a gun violence epidemic here in the state of New York, full stop, that is a statement of fact. It's a public health crisis. I don't need to tell you that it also takes you down mentally, but also the people in a community. And the survivors, family members, or the perpetrators' family members, and the younger siblings of someone who's now incarcerated or dead. And it affects the clergy, who are bearing far too many young people. This has an effect, a ripple effect. One violent act has a ripple effect through a community. So this is a public health crisis as well.
So, how do you stop public health crisis? You find the source of it, the virus, how you treat the virus and you disrupt it and you stop the transmission. That's the plan. You stopped the transmission of the violence, right? It's kind of like putting on your mask. Right. Kind of like putting on the mask. So we know that you invest in strategies that work. This is not a new issue. I'm a lot older than everybody in this room. I remember violence in the late sixties. And I remember the seventies, I remember the eighties. This is not a new phenomenon. What's new is our approach to it. We are not victims. We're not bystanders. We're actually engaged in doing something about it, that's why we're driving the numbers down again. We're making a difference. So you invest in place-based strategies. What does that mean? It means what we're doing right here. It's the place where people live. You've take it to them.
And we also had to close number of loopholes in our laws. You may have known about that. Somebody thought it was okay for 18 year olds to walk in and buy an AR-15, anybody think that's okay? Hell no. And you can't do that in New York anymore. Because we stood up, we passed some really tough laws. We have to help our law enforcement teams, retraining and getting them to understand what's going on with the people that you're charged to protect. And so, we have to bridge the divide of understanding and that's an important part of it. And that's what Rossana Rosado works out all the time. And also working with community leaders. You are all community leaders. That's why I'm calling you that. You are leading us through this. And so, some of you have lived the experience, you're uniquely situated to be able to help people.
But what the bottom line is you're building relationships, right? You know where to stand, you know the street corner, you know the public housing where people are having problems, you know where you need to stand, you know where you just kind of pull somebody in. You know this, I'm not telling you something you don't live and breathe.
A lot of houses just don't have the stability, kids don't have an adult who actually can have the luxury of time to give them. I mean, a lot of people are working two jobs and they're just trying to make ends meet trying to put food on the table. They may just not be there when their children, especially the middle school and the high school kids, need them the most. For them to see an adult who reaches out and pulls them in and mentors and that peer counseling, as they get older and say, you know, come on, man, you don't have to do that. You don't have to do that. Let me show you another path. That is what we're talking about.
Overall, we've decided to really up our budget. I just came through my first budget and I look at all the numbers, big numbers, but they're numbers that you can direct as a statement of your priorities. These are not just numbers on a piece of paper. It says I want to dramatically increase the amount of money we're spending on gun violence prevention. $220 million is what we now put and I thank the legislators for this. And that includes over $20 million. I said, well, they said, well, this is how much we always fund. I said, you know what? Let's triple that amount of money. So that's exactly the $20 million that we're investing in SNUG type programs, as well as money for law enforcement, for retraining, and to help them have strategies to reduce crime. We are better off when we are partnering together to reduce crime overall, are we not? I mean, that's how you get it done.
Also, $15 million for crime analysis centers. Why does this matter? Because people are bringing guns here from other states. I mean, where are they coming from? I'll tell you right now, they're not being sold on our streets. Legally in a store, I mean. There's no gun stores here. They're coming in from other states. So we have to have the intelligence gathering and not work in silos where NYPD does their thing and New York State does theirs and New Jersey does theirs. I brought them all together. I said for the first time ever, we're going to have nine states, nine states all around us who are all tracking together.
They meet every month. I go to their meetings and I say, I need you to stop the flow of guns from coming here because if you don't have a gun, you're not going to kill somebody. It's that simple. So we're working on that as well. And so, our task force has done an extraordinary job. Just in six months, we have more guns off the streets than we've had in 20 years. So, we're making a difference on our end.
Also, you know, you're part of this story. I want you to be part of the success when I compare the numbers from January to June this year from last year, we have an eight percent decline in shootings across the state. Eight percent down, outside of New York City. New York City itself down twelve percent. But let me tell you something else. Let me tell you something. No, I've got an even better one. Brooklyn is down 20 percent. Okay. Brooklyn is down 20 percent.
That's what you're doing. That's what you're doing. You're helping stop that. The insanity can end. We can stop this. We're making a difference. We're not through yet. We're not even close to being done. We're not done until the last person holds a gun in their hand and shoots somebody in the city, in the state. We're not there yet, but that reduction, we basically had the same number of shootings that we had in 2014, 2015, which is not the good old days, but better than they had been.
So, I just want you to feel that sense of change is coming and not to live in such despair that we can't do anything about it, that it's spiraling out of control. And it was spiraling out of control, but that's when you say no, no more, no more. We have to do something — funding more programs, supporting people, supporting our law enforcement to do their jobs. We have a way to do this and it's making a difference.
So, we talk about what we're doing and again, I'm reinforcing that we're not done yet. I mean, we just had a horrific situation. You know, just a random Tuesday night, not even a weekend night, in the summer, a Tuesday night, four hour period, we had five people shot in the city in a four hour period. I don't want to diminish what's going on. Can't do that ever, but we will continue devoting everything we have at our disposal to stop this crisis because we are seeing a difference. We need to help people get through trauma and the grief that they're experiencing, and we're going to continue treating this as a real crisis, a public health crisis.
Today, we're going to be also announcing a fund and we talk about victims and survivors and the impact on them. $13.6 million in funding to fight that response as well. That'll include funding in parts of our state that are seeing a rise. We have data, we track the numbers. We know where the cases are happening. We have over 30 nonprofits in hospitals and what we're going to be doing, which I think is phenomenal, we're going to be hiring over 150 more, what we call the credible messengers. 150 more people and that's statewide, and that includes $120,000 to hire three more people and at least get your start, get going even further. And we'll add some more next time around as well.
So, this is how we help dealing with the curing the violence. We identify the hotspots. We give the resources to organizations that are doing the great work, doing the great work and helping you ramp up your work as well.
What we're also going to do is have a $2 million fund for the Community Capacity Development Fund. What does that do? That is again, an emergency fund to help the victims where they are dealing with the trauma and response, as well as money for the Office of Gun Violence and Coordination.
I will close by saying we're going to continue changing our laws. We allowed more extreme risk order protections. You've heard about them. You know what they are and when someone shows signs of doing danger, something harmful to themselves and others, we actually are not powerless any longer. That people can say, hey, I see that. We're going to have training across the state for teachers and businesses and law enforcement and organizations like here so everybody knows what we're talking about here. That you know what the signs are. I'm not going to assume everyone knows the signs, but they will when we're done with our training. So that's an important part of what we're doing.
And again, as I mentioned, we raised the age to be able to buy an assault weapon. We did that after we saw two cases. Common denominator, two young white males under 18 years old, 18 years old, able to walk in a store and legally buy an AR-15. And that happened in my hometown at Buffalo in my neighborhood, 10 minutes from where I live, the shooting at the Tops grocery store, which was literally opening up today, I think after two months of being closed, creating a food desert because this was the store everybody went to. It was our grocery store. And still, we talk about the effect on a community and the victims left behind. People are still afraid to go to the grocery store in Buffalo. They really are. I've talked to a lot of my friends and it's just this fear. So, we have to help people. We have to help people.
And that's what we're doing. I want kids to be able to go out and play safely. I want kids to ride their bikes. I want moms to push strollers. I want kids that just feel like they're going to be okay. And how are they going to feel okay? Programs like yours, programs like this all over our city and our state.
So, I want to tell all of you how grateful I am that you have, in some cases, changed your own lives or experienced things that could have set people spiraling out for the rest of their lives. And you pulled back and you said, I can help others. I learned a lot. I know this system. I know what goes on out there. I know why people do what they do. And using your life's experiences to stop someone else from having negative experience with theirs is powerful. And I am so grateful as the Governor of the state that we have people like you, New Yorkers, who care so much about other people that just show up here in this very hot room to talk about what you're doing. But I know you're going to go out there to the even hotter streets. It's going to be 90 today and keep making a difference in people's lives. So thank you.
Thank you so much for all you do.
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