A Comparative Narrative

Introduction

The New York Times — which has a daily circulation of 571,000 and average online monthly readership of 394,500,000 — wrote 80 news pieces within the past year that mentioned the South Bronx, and most of the area’s mentions were framed with a negative light: 16 were positive, 22 were neutral or unrelated to the South Bronx (i.e. mentioning somebody’s birthplace), and 42 were negative. And its opinion section had 9 mentions of the South Bronx, where 8 were negative characterizations and 1 was semi-neutral — while highlighting police tensions, the letter to the editor also mentioned the beauty and life of the people within the area.

And to further this perception, Times reporter Al Baker is working on a project called Murder in the 4-0 that is “an examination of the life and death of each person murdered in 2016 in the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx.” The first installment of the series came out on February 18, 2016, and there have been 14 more articles since — the most recent one came out on April 6, 2017. By dedicating an entire series to the murders of the South Bronx, which generally includes Melrose, Mott Haven, and Port Morris. The boundaries are its water-facing borders by the Harlem River and East River, and the western edge goes up to 149th Street. Heading east, the boundary veers up on the diagonal Park Avenue, turns right on East 159th Street, and climbs onto 161st Street via Third Avenue. The border then sharply falls south via Prospect Avenue until it hits 149th Street and ends once the street reaches the East River. 

Baker went onto Leonard Lopate’s WNYC radio show to discuss this 2-square-mile precinct and what inspired the series: the South Bronx has the highest rates of stop-and-frisk, is the poorest congressional district, and houses 14 different New York City Housing Association projects. Baker told Lopate that police often handle over 400 cases a year, when the recommended number is 150. And he detailed how the South Bronx resources inversely match the demand. While Lincoln Medical is the best hospital within the South Bronx, it is still a terrible place to go for long-term treatment: the Times series described how a man once sat in his own excretion for hours and how people have died due to the poor treatment of patients there. After hearing it all, Lopate made a lapsus linguae, calling the hospital Lincoln Memorial instead of Lincoln Medical. He then justified his slip by saying it “seems like it should be Lincoln Memorial.” 

After an overview of nuances that the Times series highlighted, the duo concluded the 30-minute show with pontificating why so few of these atrocities are highlighted about Bronx. Both men are members of the media yet pointed fingers to the industry — they do not believe news coverage gives equal attention to the South Bronx.

“I think it has to do with what surprises us and what doesn’t,” Baker said as he responded to an inquiry by Lopate about whether the imbalanced coverage was the fault of assignment editors. “When somebody with a criminal history is killed in the South Bronx, I think for an assignment editor it feels like a less surprising, less unexpected instance, whereas if someone killed in Manhattan.”

Murder in the 4-0 Notes

The Leonard Lopate Show
http://www.wnyc.org/story/mourning-south-bronx/

-       Poorest Congressional District in the Nation
-       14 Public Housing Places – Buildings have created gangs and crews that sub family
-       Murder Rates – one of the highest in NYC, Brooklyn has similar rates
-       Overall violent crime rate, highest precinct outside of Midtown Manhattan
-       Crime overall, murder overall dropped and lower than Chicago
-       For 2 square miles
-       Not many police there are from South Bronx
-       One of the busiest precincts, called an A-House
-       South Bronx, some police have 400+ caseloads per day, 150 is recommended
-       Most police officers shot in 40th Precinct than any other one
-       Lincoln Hospital is not good with the community — one of the best places to go after you get shot but not good in the long-term
-       At Lincoln Memorial — Lincoln Medical — seems like it should be Lincoln Memorial.
-       South Bronx, a place that has some of the highest rates of stop and frisk
-       Wind up being in the wrong place at the wrong time, end up being shot by stray bullets, getting killed by abusive husbands
-       Domestic violence is one of the sort of major persistent strain of violence in the 40th precinct and around the city
-       It is one of the worst precincts for domestic violence. The Bronx as a whole is at higher rates for domestic violence than in any other borough.
-       At an age of record-low crime, what are the reasons drug dealing is happening less visible ways… Why are people getting killed in 2016 in New York City?
-       A couple of these stories sound like they would make movies or interesting novels.
-       In this case, the reward was $2,500 which is the bare minimum for a case like this [of an innocent woman killed in crossfire].
-       In another case of an innocent woman who was killed in Queens, was around the same time — the reward was considerably higher. The Mayor’s office immediately put down $10,000 on top of the $1,500 from the police.
-       A bullet flew several city blocks through trees and wires and ended up hitting her.
-       Unfortunately this sounds like the kind of a series that could just go on and on and on.
-       Something called Operation Impact, where they flooded neighborhoods with rookie cops who had to produce numbers of arrests and summonses before they focused on other things.
-       I think one of the factors in this ecosystem of neglect is the news media. The news media rarely writes about killings in the South Bronx with the same persistence and attention as a killing in Manhattan.
-       I think it has to do with what surprises us and what doesn’t. When somebody with a criminal history is killed in the South Bronx, I think for an assignment editor, it feels like a less surprising, less unexpected instance, whereas if someone killed in Manhattan.

 

Murder in the 4-0
https://www.nytimes.com/series/bronx-new-york-murder-40th-precinct

“To understand how and why killings continue in a city that has seen crime fall to historic lows, The New York Times is reporting this year on violence in the 40th Precinct, and documenting the story of each homicide.” (5 out of 14 bullet-pointed)

-       A Bronx Precinct Where Killings Persist (February 18, 2016)

  • Entrenched violence in housing projects and uneven, ineffective services for mentally ill poor people are among the stubborn causes of what killings remain in an era of historically low crime, spurring intense but often frustrating efforts by the police to identify and track the most violent and most vulnerable.
  • The 40th Precinct, though, remains one of a few areas where homicides have persisted, feeding off the isolation of poverty and turf rivalries among criminal crews that linger despite the neighborhood’s progress in undoing some of its history as an emblem of urban blight.
  • In a building where tenants are often afraid to open their doors for strangers,

-       A Cloak of Silence After a South Bronx Killing (March 18, 2016)

  • The murder created hardly a ripple in the daily pulse of a city that has largely banished fears of targeted violence to impoverished pockets, like Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn, and Mott Haven, the South Bronx neighborhood where Mr. Collazo was killed. In the 40th Precinct, though — which recorded his death as its second homicide of 2016 — it was the latest in a cycle of crew battles and personal feuds that span generations.
  • In neighborhoods like Mott Haven, a shadow system of street justice holds sway over many young black and Hispanic men, who describe addressing grievances through armed payback because they do not trust the police. Witnesses and crime victims often refuse to speak, creating a vacuum of judicial accountability in which people instead turn to guns and crews, loosely organized groups of young men usually delineated by geography.
  • With a third homicide last week, the precinct is now the third-deadliest in the city so far this year, behind the 75th Precinct, in East New York, and the 121st Precinct, on Staten Island. The number of burglaries in the 40th Precinct has more than tripled compared with the same period last year, and felony assaults, robberies and rapes have all increased by at least 50 percent.
  • The Path to Rikers
  • “The reason we talk about it so much is it is much more violent because of the guns and the easy access to them,” said Assistant Commissioner Kevin O’Connor of the Juvenile Justice Division at the Police Department.
  • But some feuds are harder to explain. At the Mill Brook Houses, the dividing lines are within the complex itself: On one side, up a hill, is Killer Brook Up, or KB Up; on the other is KB Down.
  • Along with the crews are localized subsets of notorious national gangs — Bloods, Crips and Latin Kings — many of which take shape at Rikers and drive violence across the city.
  • The streets kept a ledger of the violence… rivals eventually caught up to him.
  • At his funeral the next Sunday, two young men were handcuffed by the police as they entered the funeral home parking lot; the police said they had arrested one person, for having stolen license plates.
  • The lobby became choked with marijuana smoke.

-       A Familiar Pattern in a Spouse’s Final Act (April 9, 2016)

  • Police officers in the South Bronx are trying to break through the shame and fear that often keep victims from reporting abuse, visiting them repeatedly even if they slam the door.
  • At a recent public safety meeting, Sgt. Michael J. LoPuzzo, the commander of the 40th Precinct detective squad, expressed regret that Ms. Saavedra had never told officers she feared for her safety. “Maybe we could have prevented that,” he said.
  • There were 10 intimate-partner homicides in the Bronx last year, the highest for any borough; two were in the 40th Precinct. The borough recorded 75,299 domestic incident reports last year, a rate of 544 per 10,000 residents, compared to 347 per 10,000 residents in Brooklyn, the borough with the second-highest rate.
  • In the 40th Precinct, domestic-related major crimes, many of them felony assaults, jumped to 84 so far this year from 58 during the same period in 2015 — an increase that Capt. Thomas Alps called “very problematic” at the recent public safety meeting.
  • Despite those hurdles, police officials in the Bronx frequently try for weeks to track down domestic violence suspects. The police have also begun asking victims to sign statements about their abuse immediately to help in cases in which a victim later decides not to cooperate.
  • Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has sought to improve coordination between psychiatric hospitals and city agencies, and has put crisis teams in the South Bronx to respond to early signs of violence.

-       A Shooting, the Hospital and Then, Months Later, It’s a Homicide (May 7, 2016)

  • A stretch of sidewalk unwatched by the city’s extensive crime-fighting surveillance equipment, outside the reach of cameras, floodlights or gunshot detectors.
  • referring to a gang that, the police said, reigns in the Betances Houses and was behind a surge in shootings in the 40th Precinct that hit a recent peak of 72 in 2011 amid a feud with gang members from the nearby Moore Houses
  • The operator mixed up the street name
  • Starting around 2004, the city’s public hospitals undertook a decade-long effort to address what Dr. Robert S. Kurtz, a trauma specialist who helped lead the push, called a “national problem” of failing to prevent deep vein thrombosis.
  • An attendant had tried to take him to therapy without cleaning the stool he had been lying in for three hours.
  • On Nov. 26, Thanksgiving Day, at 7:34 p.m., with a TV commercial hawking holiday deals playing in the background, Mr. Purdy recorded another video. He lay naked on his bed, with a clump of stool and dirty wipes next to him. Speaking into his cellphone camera, he said he had been waiting 25 minutes for help.
  • Trauma care was often the first encounter with doctors in many years for young victims of violence in the South Bronx.
  • Around 1990, New York City’s child welfare agency took Ms. Johnson’s seven children from her home. Mr. Purdy was 5. His mother was sprinkling crack cocaine on cigarettes — she liked the smell of the drug mixing with tobacco — and smoking crack rocks from pipes. It was the tail end of an era when the crack cocaine trade drove violence across the city and left many children in broken homes.
  • What the police call reclassified homicide victims, injured in one year but not added to the department’s murder tally until at least the next… Of the seven reclassified homicides logged by the police so far this year, five remain unsolved, a Police Department spokesman said, a reflection of how cases become harder to close as time goes on. There were 16 over all last year.

-       An Enduring Heroin Market Shapes an Enforcer’s Rise and Fall (June 27, 2016)

  • Over nearly three decades, Mr. Perez held court on this block of East 157th Street off Melrose Avenue in the South Bronx. It was here that he climbed the rungs of the street heroin trade, wooed women, muscled out drug rivals from nearby public housing projects and, as he got closer to middle age, counseled young men to save themselves and to get honest work.
  • By turns brutal and vain, comedic and exacting, Mr. Perez survived police raids, stickups, territorial incursions and a transformation of the city’s drug trade as it came to rely less than it once had on hand-to-hand street sales.
  • Drug violence has plummeted since the early 1990s, when the neighborhoods of Mott Haven and Melrose and the rest of the precinct could see nine killings in a month. But some men still battle, though less conspicuously, over customers, turf and debts on the same corners, little touched by tides of economic change and opportunity.
  • A crack epidemic and poverty were ravaging the South Bronx in the 1980s, and debris became children’s playthings. They roamed a junkyard where people went for secondhand parts, sitting in stripped-down cars and mimicking an engine’s roar.
  • Crack vials covered the project’s sidewalks “like pigeon poop,” said Maddie, sitting on her stoop in a city hundreds of miles from the Bronx where she had moved in her 20s. Out of fear for her safety, she asked that neither her city nor her surname be identified. She and Mr. Perez used to shout, “Don’t step on the crack, you break your mother’s back!”
  • In Mr. Perez’s vast family, women were the anchors; the only male mentors he had were steeped in the aggressive ways of the street, Maddie said.
  • “You don’t know what a man is, because the only man that society showed you was the one on the corner,” she said. “Pretty much that’s what the Bronx shows you: the man on the corner.”
  • By the early ’90s, the corner of East 157th Street and Melrose Avenue was beckoning local children looking for easy cash, along with middle-class workers, like teachers and mail carriers, who were falling under heroin’s sway.
  • The intersection was among the Bronx’s busier drug markets, just far enough from the hubbub of the projects and the police stationed there, and a quick hop from several thoroughfares. Arson and demolitions had left a single five-story building on the south side of 157th Street, with a few squatters inside. Heroin changed hands in the lobby and on a second-floor landing.

-       Social Circles Collide on a Dance Floor. Then a Brawl Ends in Death (August 4, 2016)
-       Quest for a New Life Ends in a Tangle of Gang Ties (August 25, 2016)
-       A Mother is Shot Dead on a Playground, and a Sea of Witnesses Goes Silent (October 7, 2016)
-       Grandmother’s Killing Lays Bare a Dilemma in Child Welfare Work (November 8, 2016)
-       A Man is Shot in the Back, and Only the Police Are Kept in the Dark (December 15, 2016)
-       Rift Between Officers and Residents as Killings Persist in South Bronx (December 31, 2016)
-       A Bullet Misses Its Mark, and Then Takes a Fatal Detour (January 19, 2017)
-       After a Killing: ‘I Only Wanted to Scare Them’ (February 24, 2017)
-       In the South Bronx, Lives Marred and Erased by Firearms (April 6, 2017)

A Comparative Narrative