About 90 percent of people arrested by the NYPD on gun charges are back out on the street, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said Tuesday, calling the court system an “open door.”
The top cop gave the figure during an appearance on PIX 11 Tuesday morning, in which he said six shootings were reported across the Big Apple on Monday alone, despite a snowstorm that dumped more than 17 inches on the city.
The violence follows a year of skyrocketing shootings and homicides across the city in 2020.
“What we’re seeing is a revolving door, or maybe you can just say an open door, where 90 percent roughly of the people that we’ve arrested for guns are out on the street, whether they’re awaiting a disposition of their court case or they’re not prosecuted,” the commissioner said. “And that is a real obstacle that we continue to have to face.”
The problem, according to Shea, is not so much removing guns from the street, but “getting the people that carry guns off the street.”
“Let’s be very clear here,” he said. “We’re making more gun arrests than we ever have. But we can continue to make those gun arrests, and until we have real discussions and real follow-through on consequences, we’re going to have a tough road.”
Shea credited “redeployment” within the detective bureau for the increase in gun arrests, saying that he believes the department is doing it “smartly” and “constitutionally.”
Though the commissioner has pointed to the crippled court system during the coronavirus crisis as a factor in keeping alleged criminals on the streets, he said he doesn’t think an end to the pandemic will solve the problem completely.
“I think that things will get better when we have a normalcy return,” Shea said. “But I also am very concerned about even when the courts go back to normal, the normal state of affairs is not good….We still have a system here right now that is not worried enough about the victims of crime and is a little out of balance.”