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Banned
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Originally Posted by Tarl Cabot
Perhaps you would like to name a municipality in which gun restrictions have led to a decrease in crime.
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One breakthrough that helped New York City to deter illegal firearms posession and to enforce the strictest gun control laws in the U.S., resulting in less crminal shooting incidents, was:
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/23/national/23LIVE.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/23/national/23LIVE.html</a>
or.....<a href="http://www.policetalk.com/ginsburg.html">http://www.policetalk.com/ginsburg.html</a>
December 23, 2000
Public Lives: The Woman Who Changed the Illegal-Gun Landscape
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
Paul Hosefros/ The New York Times
Susan Ginsburg, a groundbreaking firearms enforcement adviser at the Treasury.
WASHINGTON -- There are packing boxes now in her spacious Treasury Department office overlooking the White House, and there will soon be a new treasury secretary overseeing gun issues and, with a new administration, probably a new gun-control policy.
But as she gets ready to leave her obscure job as senior adviser for firearms policy coordination to the under secretary of the treasury for enforcement, Susan Ginsburg can take satisfaction that she has presided over what some law- enforcement officials and academic specialists call one of the most important accomplishments of the Clinton administration. With no public recognition, she has helped transform the understanding of how criminals and juveniles get guns, an achievement that has provided new ways to crack down on the illegal firearms market.
Before Ms. Ginsburg, it was widely believed that little could be done to prevent criminals from getting guns. There were roughly 200 million firearms in America, and the thinking was that criminals simply stole their weapons from that huge supply.
But Ms. Ginsburg helped arrange for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to undertake widespread tracing of guns used in crime, and as a result it is now known that most criminals buy their firearms from licensed dealers, gun traffickers or straw purchasers. That in turn has led police agencies across the nation to make targets of corrupt dealers and illicit traffickers for the first time.
"To put what she did in perspective, it's like saying that up till five years ago, nobody had been doing any drug enforcement," said David Kennedy, a senior researcher at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard.
Philip J. Cook, a professor of public policy at Duke, turns to the Bible for a comparison. "Susan reminds me of the story of the miracle of the loaves and fishes," he said. "She may not have had a staff," he said, and she worked under the shadow of the National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress, but she essentially created a new federal policy out of little more than some abstruse academic thinking. "She has really been one of my heroes."
At least as remarkable, in contemporary Washington, Ms. Ginsburg has never been quoted by name in a newspaper or appeared on television. Her anonymity is such that when asked his reaction to her work, even Bill Powers, the chief spokesman for the N.R.A., said he had never heard of her.
That is precisely how Ms. Ginsburg, wary of gun-control politics and modest as well, has wanted it. "I've been very disciplined about not seeking publicity," she said. Even when she knew this profile of her was being written, she insisted in a cascade of messages that the real credit should go to Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, people at the firearms bureau and the academic researchers who first suggested to her the possibilities of gun tracing..............
............ Ms. Ginsburg had no special interest in gun control when in 1995, as an official at the Treasury Department, the firearms bureau's parent, she was invited to an academic conference in Santa Fe, N.M., on youth violence.
It was there that scholars like Mr. Kennedy and Professor Cook explained to her their new findings suggesting that criminals were buying their guns, directly or indirectly, from licensed dealers, rather than stealing them.
"I became an accidental convert," Ms. Ginsburg said. "It was my job to translate their ideas into policy," some of which she did in telephone calls with them lasting up to 10 hours, without an interruption for a meal.
Ms. Ginsburg then put the resources of the firearms bureau to work, greatly increasing the number of crime guns it traced. By now, the agency has recruited 50 cities and 6 states to trace all guns they recover in crimes.
The research has produced some crucial findings. For example, it has shown that only a small fraction of dealers, 1.2 percent of the total, accounted for more than half of crime guns traced in 1998. At the same time, it has underscored the scholars' initial discovery that criminals and juveniles want only certain guns: high-powered semiautomatic handguns of a kind widely available only in the last few years.
Contrary to the experience of earlier years, when the N.R.A.'s supporters in Congress kept the firearms agency's budget small, Ms. Ginsburg came up with a way to diffuse Congressional opposition. By focusing on criminal conduct by scofflaw dealers and criminals' acquisition of guns, she found a middle ground between gun-control advocates and the rifle association that has broad political appeal.
The result, she said, is that in the budget passed by Congress last week, there is money to hire 500 new A.T.F. agents. That will be the first real expansion in agent staffing since the bureau was created nearly three decades ago
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<a href="http://www.vera.org/publication_pdf/223_428.pdf">http://www.vera.org/publication_pdf/223_428.pdf</a>
REDUCING GUN VIOLENCE: AN OVERVIEW OF NEW YORK CITY’S STRATEGIES
Megan Golden
Cari Almo
Vera Institute of Justice
March 2004
(Pg. 8) In contrast to the recent national trends, gun violence has decreased in New York City, a leader in reducing crime. Between 1999 and 2002, the number of shooting victims in New York City fell seven percent, from 2,030 in 1999 to 1,892 in 2002. This number declined by another three percent in 2003, to 1,837. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) attributes these declines to a range of initiatives it has implemented to combat gun violence. Because gun crimes do not occur in a vacuum, the NYPD embeds specific initiatives within its broader crime-fighting strategies and collaborates with other law-enforcement agencies to supplement and fortify its efforts.
This paper is intended as a guide for law enforcement and public safety agencies in the United States and worldwide that are looking for effective strategies to reduce gun violence and gun trafficking. The paper describes some of the strategies that the NYPD, in cooperation with other government agencies, has implemented to reduce gun violence, as described by the NYPD officials who manage them. Although the department has not evaluated these programs through formal social science research, it monitors their effectiveness through its internal management processes.
Gun Intelligence Initiatives
The NYPD depends on citizens and technology to provide investigators with information that helps them to solve cases more quickly and prevent future gun violence. The department uses several strategies to encourage citizens to share information on illegal guns; it uses this intelligence to plan operations, build cases against gun perpetrators, and to find and recover illegal guns and those who distribute them. The NYPD’s use of sophisticated technology to identify crime patterns and link specific guns to crimes, even without having recovered the weapon, complements its use of human intelligence.
(pg. 12) Collaboration Between the NYPD and Other Agencies
Another way the NYPD works to prevent gun violence is to collaborate with other agencies that can supplement its own efforts and resources. These collaborations include the Joint Firearms Task Force with the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF); a Gun Court with the Mayor’s Office of the Criminal Justice Coordinator, the state court system, and local prosecutors; and Triggerlock with federal prosecutors.
(pg. 13) Joint Firearms Task Force
The Joint Firearms Task Force is a partnership between the NYPD and the ATF to reduce interstate gun trafficking into New York City by identifying out-of-state gun purchases destined for New York and apprehending the people responsible before the guns hit the city’s streets. Teams from the ATF work with police officers to trace all illegal guns recovered in New York City. Using a gun’s serial number, agents trace each gun to its original place of purchase. If the gun was purchased out of state, ATF agents use sales records to track the original purchaser. ATF agents interview the original purchaser to find out what he or she did with the gun. The agents then interview the next owner, as reported by the first one, and so on. They continue to do this until they have traced the gun to its recovery.<b>
Officers have found that traffickers frequently pay people (referred to as “straw purchasers”) a small fee to purchase large numbers of guns in states with lax gun laws. Then the traffickers drive the guns to cities with more restrictive gun laws and sell them to people on the street. Once ATF agents have traced a gun’s pathway, they prosecute the trafficker in federal court, using the straw purchasers as witnesses. In 2000, the states that were the largest sources of illegal guns in New York City were Florida, Virginia, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.</b>
In one case, dubbed the “Iron Pipeline Case,” the Task Force traced several guns purchased by the Firearms Investigation Unit in undercover operations to gun dealers in Georgia and South Carolina. Through investigations in those states, the Task Force identified eight “straw purchasers,” most of whom were young women. They learned that a New York-based trafficker had paid the women to buy guns, which the trafficker then drove to New York City and sold. Eventually, this NYPD-ATF collaboration allowed law enforcement to build a solid case against this man, arrest him, and prosecute him in federal court.
Keys to success. A key to the task force’s success is the division of responsibilities between the Task Force and other NYPD units. Officers and detectives in the FIU and in the police precincts focus on seizing guns from the streets of New York, while the Task Force uses its expertise conducting investigations of and building cases for violation of federal laws. The NYPD officers assigned to the Joint Firearms Task Force are cross-designated as federal agents, allowing them to cross state borders and enforce federal laws. They serve as the link between the NYPD officers in New York and the federal agents and prosecutors enforcing federal laws against interstate gun trafficking.
Gun Court
Despite a one-year mandatory minimum sentence for gun possession, people convicted of gun possession in New York City in the past often did not receive jail sentences. To address this issue, the Mayor’s Office worked with the Office of the Court
Administration, the Brooklyn District Attorney, and the NYPD to create a specialized Gun Court for people charged with gun possession. One judge and three prosecutors are dedicated to the court, allowing them to become experts in gun possession cases. The goal is to process gun cases more quickly and have more gun offenders serve the minimum sentence, thereby deterring future gun crimes.
The Mayor’s Office and the NYPD used data to identify the five police precincts in Brooklyn with the highest violent crime rates and gun arrests; the cases of people charged with gun possession in these five precincts are tried in the Gun Court. Officers within these precincts attend a three-day training about illegal gun possession. The training focuses on recognizing illegal gun possession, safely apprehending people with illegal guns, and testifying against these suspects in court. Roughly 200 cases were referred to the Gun Court from April through October 2003. During its first six months, the proportion of defendants sentenced to jail without probation increased from 14 to 44 percent and probation-only sentences were virtually eliminated. In September 2003, two additional precincts were included in the pilot, and in 2004 the court will expand to cover almost half of the city’s 76 precincts.5
Keys to success. Government officials involved in planning and monitoring the Gun Court believe that training to help officers identify people who illegally possess guns and testify against them is a key component of the program. Of equal importance is the expertise in legal and non-legal issues in gun cases that the judge and prosecutors develop through their work in the court.
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