Sunday, September 03, 2006
BY JONATHAN SCHUPPE
Star-Ledger Staff
Newark police are seizing guns at a record-setting pace this year, another sign that firearms are becoming more widespread in the city, officials say.
Shootings and homicides -- including the shooting early yesterday of five people, three fatally, in an apartment on Sanford Avenue -- are also up, even as overall crime continues to drop. It's a disturbing trend in which police are seeing more petty altercations ending with gunfire.
"It's a disgrace what's happening in this county, this city and across the state. Our homicides are directly related to an increase in handguns in our community and it has to stop," Essex County Prosecutor Paula Dow said during a press conference on yesterday's triple homicide.
If Newark police keep seizing guns at their current rate -- they've recovered nearly 600 so far -- they are on track to reach the 800 mark by year's end, easily surpassing the previous record of 737 in 2003. Shootings are also on pace to reach about 380, a five-year high. And it looks like Newark will surpass the 97 homicides in 2005, the most in a decade.
"I think there are more guns out there today," said acting Newark Police Chief Anthony Campos. "Just look at the number of guns we're recovering. And look at the number of homicides and shootings. Look at the ease with which people resort to guns to settle disputes. It's more spur-of-the-moment, more irrational."
Christopher Andreychak, an acting State Police captain who runs a shooting investigation squad with Newark and Irvington police, added, "It's like everyone has a gun, and it really has gotten dangerous."
Seizures are up not only because there are more guns, but also because local and state police are focusing more on them, Andreychak said. "But the thing that really scares me is this -- are we getting so many more guns but still not keeping pace with the guns coming into the community?"
For months, police and crime experts have been warning of a rising culture of gun use in Newark in which more people are using firearms to solve problems on the street.
This swell in gun violence, also plaguing many other cities around the country, is compared by crime experts to the outbreak of a contagious disease: A spate of shootings scares more people into feeling the need to arm themselves, making them more likely to pull a gun during an argument.
"You can imagine how that spreads through a community where the mind-set is, 'Everyone has a gun out there, it's dangerous, and it's best I have mine,'" said Daniel Webster, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore.
Fueling this trend are shifting cultural attitudes that make it more acceptable to carry a gun, police say. Firearms are glamorized on the street because they bring instant respect and power, an image reinforced in music and movies.
This change seems to be reflected in the ways police are finding guns. While police are targeting illegal guns more aggressively, they're also turning up a lot of guns during run-of-the-mill operations.
"In the past, when we did a gang or narcotics raid, it was unusual to come up with guns. Now we're hitting houses on routine search warrants and getting three or four guns," Andreychak said. "And we're seeing a lot more guns that are capable of shooting a lot of bullets very quickly, and more high-capacity magazines."
Take a recent three-day stretch in Newark, from Aug. 24 to 27. During that period, police recovered a dozen guns. Among the guns seized were two small-caliber handguns found during a domestic violence call; a Cobray Mac-11 assault-style rifle taken from a group of men hanging out near the Baxter Terrace public housing complex; a .32-caliber Colt pistol taken from a taxi passenger who bolted from police during a traffic stop; a Colt .45-caliber gun spotted in the waistband of a man pulled over for riding his motorcycle carelessly; a .45-caliber Ruger pistol found by a woman cleaning out her ex-boyfriend's old shoe boxes; and a .380-caliber Davis Industries pistol taken from a man after he was heard by passing detectives shouting, "My gun's bigger than yours."
Campos argued most of those seizures wouldn't have happened if the officers weren't looking for illegal guns. That's been one of his priorities since Mayor Cory Booker named him acting chief in July.
Campos said he has put more officers on overnight shifts, when most shootings happen. He has also added more officers to the gang intelligence unit and deployed a "street crimes task force" to focus on shooting-prone neighborhoods.
Since those changes, the department has been seizing more guns, Campos said. In August, he said, police recovered an average of three guns a day, compared with an average of 1.8 a day for the rest of the year.
"That shows we're picking up the pace," he said.
Campos said he believes gun violence will ebb as police continue to seize guns at a faster rate.
Crime experts say street crackdowns are the way to go, because research shows that the biggest factor determining whether people carry illegal guns is their perception of how vigilantly police will look for them.
"It's not about the severity of punishment," said Michael Wagers, director of the Police Institute at Rutgers-Newark. "It's about the certainty of getting caught. And that certainty piece lies in good police work."
Besides the obvious benefit of cutting the number of guns and shootings, gun seizures also help solve other crimes.
All recovered guns are submitted to the police department's ballistics lab for tests to determine if they have ever been used in a shooting before. First, police need a bullet or shell casing from the earlier shooting. Then they have to compare it to bullets or shell casings from the recovered weapon. Since 2004, police have made 87 such matches, and that evidence has been used to charge suspects in earlier shootings.
Recovered guns can also lead detectives to firearm-trafficking networks. If police can read the serial number, they can trace a gun back to its original point of sale by using data from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Most of the weapons turn out to have been brought to Newark from Southern states where gun laws are more lenient. So Newark detectives work with ATF agents to track the people bringing them here.
Most important, however, is reducing violence in neighborhoods where guns do their most damage.
Typically, a city's cycle of violence "flames out" as more people involved in gun crimes end up seriously injured, killed or in prison, said Webster, the Johns Hopkins professor. But controlling gun violence also depends on police targeting places where it abounds.
"The best means to tamp down on guns is to focus on illegal gun possession in shooting hot spots," Webster said. "Address the guns, and the fear factor in the community is going to down, and hopefully violence will cool down, too."
Jonathan Schuppe covers Newark. He may be reached at jschuppe@starledger.com or (973) 392-7960.
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