“How community activists, police and residents drove down shootings in East Harlem”
By Brittany Kriegstein, Published May 5, 2025,
Johnny Cadogan, a 19-year-old East Harlem native, said he doesn’t look over his shoulder as much as he did a few years ago.
“ It’s become a lot safer,” he said of his neighborhood on a recent afternoon. “You could actually walk outside and not have to worry about getting shot.”
Cadogan and five of his friends were playing cards inside the community center at the Wagner Houses, one of more than two dozen public housing developments in East Harlem. The site hosts one of about 100 “Cornerstone” programs that offer activities and resources for young people at NYCHA complexes citywide. Experts say the relationships they foster there help prevent violence.
East Harlem was hit hard by the spike in shootings that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic, especially near its public housing. From 2020 to 2022, the neighborhood contained one of New York City’s gun violence “hot spots” — blocks with 10 or more shootings within those two years — according to a Gothamist analysis of NYPD data. It was part of an overall rise in shootings as the pandemic destabilized antiviolence efforts and drove economic disruption and social isolation. Police recorded 11 shootings in the square block around NYCHA’s East River Houses on East 102nd Street and First Avenue, one of the city’s highest concentrations of gun violence.
But East Harlem’s public housing complexes have since achieved a sustained decline in shootings, while other NYCHA properties continue to struggle with high rates of gun violence, police data shows. From 2023 to 2024, the decrease was roughly 30%. The citywide drop was only 7%.
Criminologists say shootings disproportionately affect public housing properties due to a lack of community investment, poor living conditions, unauthorized occupants with criminal histories, and conflicts between crews from different developments. In East Harlem, reporting by Gothamist found that a special collaboration involving local nonprofits, community mentors, law enforcement officials and residents has reduced gun violence to its lowest level since 2019 — and could offer lessons for other neighborhoods.
The turnaround is the result of free-flowing communication among community leaders and organizations, as well as targeted policing and trust built on months of face-to-face interactions with neighbors, according to interviews with more than a dozen residents, Cornerstone staffers and police leaders in East Harlem.
But they cautioned the improvements are tenuous: A single homicide can spark years of retaliation.
“You are able to work with these young people, provide structure to them, opportunities,” said Eugene Rodriguez, program director at the Wagner Cornerstone on East 120th Street near First Avenue. “When you don’t have that center in your development, all of that is gone. So who picks those kids up? The streets will.”
In early April, more than a dozen law enforcement officials, youth organization directors and others filed into the third-floor conference room of a building near the East River Houses to discuss neighborhood violence since the year’s start. Four people had been shot and injured, according to police, who said gang members at two NYCHA developments had caused some of the incidents. There were several other instances where shots were fired but no one was hit.
At the head of the table sat Lew Zuchman, a gray-haired man in his 80s, wearing a button-down shirt and blazer. Zuchman, who is white, Jewish and grew up in Forest Hills, stood out in the group of predominantly Black and Latino New Yorkers. But when he spoke, everyone listened.
Zuchman first earned the respect of civil rights activists when he joined the Freedom Rides in 1961 and was incarcerated for 40 days in Mississippi. After he returned to New York City, he began working with young people involved in gangs to counter crime. In 1987, he became executive director of SCAN-Harbor, a nonprofit that has served East Harlem youth for nearly 50 years and receives millions of dollars in annual city funding for after-school and summer programming, tutoring and youth employment initiatives at more than 20 sites in Manhattan and the Bronx.
“Does anybody know these guys? What can we do to positively intervene here?” Zuchman asked those at the table, referring to young men allegedly involved in the shootings.
It was the group’s monthly meeting, where members shared on-the-ground intel and strategized ways to stop violence on specific streets. Members include SCAN-Harbor staff, nonprofit leaders, and officials from the NYPD, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, NYCHA and the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development, which administers the Cornerstone programs. On that particular day, they all concluded their interventions needed to start with kids as young as 9, who they worried were already at risk of getting into dangerous situations.
“Once someone’s killed, there’s nothing you can do,” Zuchman told Gothamist. “By us coming together and talking to each other, solutions organically seem to evolve.”
New leadership at the NYPD’s local public housing division has improved relations between police and residents in the past several years, Zuchman said. When Deputy Inspector Rebecca Bukofzer-Tavarez took over in December 2023, Zuchman said he was cautiously optimistic she would continue her predecessor’s efforts to overcome a period of deep distrust following the fatal shooting of an NYPD officer in East Harlem in 2015. So far, he said, he has been impressed by Bukofzer-Tavarez, who attended the April meeting with several of her officers, listened to the group’s concerns and suggested how police could be deployed.
A few days later, at the NYPD division’s headquarters on East 123rd Street, she showed Gothamist a whiteboard with color-coded descriptions of recent shootings. The colors represented whether the victims lived in public housing, so Bukofzer-Tavarez and her team of almost 100 officers — many of whom she recruited — could determine how to prioritize their resources for some 38,000 NYCHA residents.
“Our crime related to violence largely has to do with crews,” she said. “One particular group will live in a series of buildings and not really like another group that lives in another building.”
Bukofzer-Tavarez said most of her officers are on duty between 5:30 p.m. and 2 a.m., when most incidents tend to happen, and patrol officers work 24-hour shifts.
“ We create the culture here where they know that they’re part of the community,” she said.
Experts say the community centers and resident cooperation are just as crucial in driving down shootings as law enforcement is.
SCAN-Harbor staffs seven Cornerstone centers in the neighborhood, and some bring together young people from different NYCHA developments, as well as various community groups. They are open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. most days during the school year, and until 11 p.m. throughout the summer, when shootings usually spike.
A high density of local nonprofits can lead to reductions in violent crime, research has shown. Talib Hudson — who founded a community development organization called the New Hood that works in northern Manhattan — said the Cornerstone model appears to be doing just that.
But, he said, sufficiently funding such programs is essential, whether to pay for organizers or repairs to local infrastructure. East Harlem Cornerstones are budgeted for $3.5 million in city funding this fiscal year, according to the Department of Youth and Community Development.
Cornerstones, which launched in 2010 and receive around $60 million annually from the city, served more than 19,000 youth and 7,000 adults last fiscal year, according to the latest Mayor’s Management Report. Those numbers represent increases of 19% and 12%, respectively, from two years prior.
Several East Harlem nonprofits focused on gun violence prevention each won $20,000 grants in 2023 from the Manhattan DA’s criminal justice investment initiative. Jordan Stockdale, who served as DA Alvin Bragg’s chief of staff at the time, said it was part of a broader strategy to address shootings in East Harlem by both engaging the neighborhood’s most at-risk youth and doubling down on investigations. For a time, he said, the DA’s office would assign as many investigators to a nonfatal shooting as it would a homicide, to better understand the origins of violence.
Back in 2021, police arrested 13 people allegedly associated with a gang at the Wagner Houses. And last month, they said they arrested 16 people from rival crews at NYCHA’s Lehman and Johnson houses and a private complex known as the A.K. Houses. Officials said the defendants were responsible for half of East Harlem’s shootings last summer.
Criminologists say these kinds of high-profile busts where suspects are known among their peers are a crucial deterrent. But the city’s “gang database,” which officials touted as an important tool in the arrests, remains controversial due to concerns over racial profiling and surveillance. A bill before the City Council would ban the tracker, and legal defense organizations are suing to eliminate it.
“Enforcement and deterrence is really important, but the prolonged effects I think are [from] the community groups,” Stockdale said. “It’s about individual leadership to some extent. People have to be trusted in the community.”
Despite the decline in shootings, some East Harlem residents said they were still concerned about gun violence.
“ You can’t tell me that it’s getting better around here,” said Charles Herring, who spoke to Gothamist in front of the Johnson Houses. “They just locked a whole bunch of gang members up for shootings from two years ago. That’s still constantly going on. … Stats are just numbers.”
Residents also pointed to the fact that some blocks bear the brunt of shootings and life can look drastically different just a short walk away. Last year, Gothamist found that just 4% of city blocks accounted for nearly all local shootings from 2020 to June 2024.
Hudson from the New Hood said he understood those concerns.
“ If even one person is shot, it can create a sense of ‘there’s a lot of shooting going on here,’ even though statistically that may not necessarily be the case,” he said.
Others in East Harlem said they felt safer than they could remember in recent times — even down to the sensory level.
“As of late, it’s been pretty quiet,” Anselmo Gustavo Ruiz said at NYCHA’s Washington Houses. “You haven’t been hearing many gunshots.”