For WXXI.

This is connections filling in for Evan Dawson.

I am Gino Fanelli.

Today's connection with me between June 19th, 2025 and 2026.

During that 365 day span, 139 people were shot in the city of Rochester.

While 139 is still a lot of shootings.

That figure is the lowest it's been since 2011, and marks a precipitous drop since the pandemic era peak.

The height came between March 14th, 2021 and 2022, when 428 people were shot in the city.

As of today, five homicides have occurred in the city so far this year.

One of them with my shooting.

Joining me to talk about what has changed in the past few years, I'm joined by Pastor Willie Lightfoot, founder of the Rock Against Gun Violence Coalition.

Willie, thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me.

And, Rochester police Captain Greg Bow.

Thank you for being here, Greg.

Yeah.

Of course.

Thanks so much for having you.

So I kind of want to start with first.

I just want to say something.

We're talking about crime trends as kind of a bigger picture of what's happening here.

And I think this is not to say that there is not violent crime that happens in the city, that there was not shootings that happened in the city of I just mentioned there was 139 in the past year.

But it needs to say that even if you do see these kind of events happening that are scary, that are, that can give an impression of a lack of safety and should be taken seriously.

That doesn't mean that the overarching view is that we are heading in a direction where violent crime is trending downwards, and that's the point to say that there is a difference between the perception of what is happening in the community and the data supported numbers of the the best data that we have to show what is happening in a larger scale and what has been trending over the past couple of years.

So I want to talk about that trend right now.

We are trending downward in violent crime in the city.

Shootings are down, homicides are down.

And this is a trend that we saw nationwide during the pandemic.

All across the country, violent crime spiked, during the pandemic era, and it's been trending back down the year since then.

In Rochester, we saw a very dramatic version of this.

Shootings were extremely high, during the first couple of years of the pandemic.

And as time has gone on, they're now at a point that's the lowest it's been in 15 years.

So I want to get a sense from both of you of what changed during that time period.

There is kind of this natural occurrence of the pandemic happening, and then there have to be more than that that is contributing to that.

So, Greg, I'll start with you of what the police department has been doing differently and how that might be playing into this.

Sure.

So a few different things, and I appreciate that, you know, because crime is not violent.

Crime is not gone.

Right.

It is down significantly.

And, you know, we love you know, we can sit here and celebrate the wins.

But but we're not there.

Right.

Like there's a long ways to go.

We still have, you know, put it in perspective.

We still have 49 people that have been shot so far this year in the city of Rochester, and that put that at the same time.

That compares to 178 at this time of year back in 2021.

So we're down, you know, or less than a third of where we were at, just a couple of years ago and so or five years ago.

So we're on a great trend.

And a lot of that comes down to evidence based policing.

And a lot of that comes down to our our community interactions and our building our trust back with the community.

Because if you recall, during the pandemic time, it was also at the time of very anti-police movements going on across the country and a lot of police community relation strains, for lack of better terms.

And, here in city of Roger, we've done a ton to rebuild those community relations.

Whether that be, we're coming up on year three of, we're the only I believe we're the only police department in the nation that hosts an HBCU fall classic.

Yes.

You know, thinking outside the box and building those bonds and community bonds.

We've got a ton of programs.

To come and just did.

Oh, yeah.

Thank you.

Steph, what's the best?

Yeah.

And, you know, unfortunately, he left us to go back to Jersey, but he took a, you know, he went home where his family is, and that was great for him.

But, you know, we've one of the only police agencies we partner with, the Urban League.

We still have, youth space inside the Urban League at times for meetings.

And we've really rebuilt a lot of that community trust and continue to rebuild that community trust.

So that's number one.

And then number two is evidence based policing is really going after whether it through through give through our partnerships with whether it be ATF and other other federal partners, the sheriff's office and local towns and state police.

We've really just, increased the precision of our policing instead of casting wide dragnets going after those are propensity for guns going after the shooters.

And then at the same time, going and taking care of the neighborhoods, whether it be project, you know, our uplift programs that we have going on where, you know, we're really focusing on specific street segments and broken those down real small, whether just be a block of a street and not just drag netting, every criminal activity that occurs there, but bringing that neighborhood up, going out, walking beats, whether it be our corporate patrols, whether that be, just regular walking beats and going out and and doing what we can to increase everything about that street segment, you know, working to uplift instead of down with, with criminals and hitting both facets of it.

You talk a little bit more about the patrols.

I know they're very targeted to an area.

And so what makes you look at a certain area and saying, we need to be doing this, and how does that actually play out?

Yeah.

So Cobra Patrols is a it's from Doctor Cobra.

There's huge studies back behind it that he did.

But essentially what we have is we've got the city broken down beyond our just our car rates.

It's broken down by, let's say around 13 or 14,000 street segments.

And so again, even, you know, in the past looking at heat maps, you'd say, okay, this neighborhood we need to work on, you know, x, y, z neighborhood.

No.

Now we're saying, okay, you know, really I'll speak familiar with Jefferson Avenue instead of saying Jefferson Avenue and total.

Okay.

The 400 block of Jefferson Avenue, right.

This 100 yard stretch, this 50 yard stretch and focusing.

Okay, so now if this 100 yard stretch, especially, you know, on afternoons or early evenings, and you can look at all the different stats on Wednesdays and Thursdays or whatever, now focusing and saying, okay, well, we're going to walk that time.

Our officers are going to get out of the car and they're going to walk 15 minutes or 30 minutes, that 400 block of Jefferson Avenue, not just Jefferson Avenue in general, and put resources out.

They're going out, stopping into the corner store, stopping to libraries, the rec centers and going out and being that visible presence, even if it's just parking your police car there while doing your report writing.

Because a visible police presence generally not always, you're not gonna go shooting somebody with a police officer right there.

You're not going to go shoot somebody in the police car sitting there.

And so really being smart, focused and targeted on our proactive, relationship building and our proactive, visibility are high visibility.

So all of our officers are required to do copiar pitch.

All of our patrol officers required to get out, do Cobra patrols every day.

And then what you're also doing, if we say, and I'm not speaking the 400 block of Jefferson Abbey, I just picked the right spot.

But, if an officer is out walking all the time and that 400 block Jefferson Avenue, the officer that works at carpet, guess who everybody knows.

The officer knows everybody in that area, and everybody in that area knows the officer.

And getting back to that kind of community policing aspect of things as well, that builds those trust and build those relationships.

Well, you started the, rock against Gun Violence Coalition in, 2018.

Yes.

Right after as soon as I got on city council.

Yeah.

And I want to get a sense from you about at that point in time, what was kind of your biggest concern then?

And then we went through this, you know, two years later, this massive, a spike of violent crime.

I think the a big part of it is you have to, you know, bridge a lot of gaps.

You have to connect a lot of people that are involved there have different stakes in the community or know about what are some of the causes of the violence to begin with, you have to get everyone to kind of work together and had this really difficult conversation to address the issue.

So I want to get a sense of when when you started, then with what the goal was, how you were doing it, and you know how that kind of evolved over the years.

Thank you for the question.

But before we go to that, I want to piggyback off of the first question, of what do we think has changed over the years?

And of course, from my point of view, from being a faith, a person of faith and a pastor, you know, I truly believe in the power of prayer.

And I believe that the effectual fervent prayers of the righteous availeth much.

And I will tell you that people have been praying earnestly, over our for our law enforcement, our all of, you know, our National Day of Prayer, I think of, Bishop Singleton and various others who just pray around the clock for our city and for safety in our city.

So I, I truly, don't want to be remiss if I didn't say, you know, that I truly think acts of God are also with us and here in Rochester, because those 100 and something shootings could have been 100 something homicides, but they were not.

And that's only like through the grace of God.

And then, you know, I would say that the mayors that we've had in the past, I have the pleasure of working with all of them.

And I can tell you this personally into this community, that every single mayor that we've had over the last couple of decades, whether it was Mayor Duffy, whether it is, William Johnson junior, junior, or whether it was, lovely Warren and his current mayor, Malik Evans, that I've worked very, very closely with.

They all were concerned about public safety in eradicating violence and gun violence within the city.

And they've done things to help to do that.

And I can tell you from the perspective of and I agree with, the captain in regards to the way we've changed how policing is being done, I personally can see the change in community policing being on.

Jefferson has just one of the examples, being a business owner there, I see the presence of the police more than I've ever seen, in the past.

I can tell you that the partnerships that the captain mentioned and I now transition from those partnerships into your second question of the Rock Against Gun Rights Coalition, because that's what it was all about, was partnerships.

Is something that is unique in Rochester.

And as me being a part of the clergy for Safe City.

So these are pastors that are dealing with gun violence all across the country.

We have something very unique in this city that they don't have in other cities, which is a collaborative tables where people work, collectively to eradicate and educate and advocate around gun violence within our community.

So that is very powerful, and we ought to be proud of ourselves, as Rochester is to be able to do away with these silos and realize that life safety is more important than egos and pride.

And all of these other things and politics, for that matter.

And so for me, right, the hat of city council, I also have to say that I want to tip my hat to, the council and administration because we change how we do business in Council City, Rochester in and government typically didn't do human services.

I served on county legislature.

I served on city council.

When I was on the county legislature.

I was on the public safety.

I was on the Human Service committee.

Rochester didn't do human service.

We didn't do that type of work.

The city Council, in the last eight years have changed tries to the Department of Human Service and Recreation.

So we're doing human service work now.

We're doing, non-police violent, responses, now that we weren't doing before nonviolent, police responses.

We have beefed up, the crisis intervention teams.

We've beefed up all of these various programing to.

We now have the Rock Against Gun Violence Coalition, which we did not have before, started in 2018.

I literally felt when I came in the city city council that my job coming from public safety, 20 something years in a Rochester fire department, going to these cause of these shootings, seeing friends and family and people that I know devastated by the harm that violence causes in our community.

I wanted to make a difference in a change.

And then it was not about me.

It was about us, because I realized that a lot of the, people weren't talking to each other.

So there is.

Hence, the Rock Against Gun Violence coalition started.

We collaborated with and we still meet to this day with, array of partners from, the police to ATF to, college.

You of our city, boots on the ground, rise up Rochester, rock to pieces, Pathways of peace, etc., etc.

are all at this table to work collectively in eradicating gun violence.

And what we found out, you know, and, and I'll, pause, to, to, you know, let other questions and, and captains chime in, is that we found that there really wasn't a lot of conversation collectively happening on a regular basis to meet the needs of the victims and those most impacted in these communities.

And I'll say this last one of the things that we realized in the Rock Against Gun Violence Coalition, only 10% of the streets cause 90% of the violence in this community.

And when you look at when we get into the The Trace report, we'll see the the seven zip codes are typically represent and it's the same crescent, it's the same area that we've been talking about for 50 years.

Right.

So that's very important that we understand that this is a concentrated problem in Rochester.

Yeah I want to talk about the gun trace.

The data that came out earlier this month.

So the city has partnered with Brady.

Their a gun policy advocacy group.

They're down in DC.

And you know, the interesting trend that I saw in it is that, you know, a plurality of the guns are still coming from out of state, from states with kind of lax gun laws.

Florida, Georgia, Ohio.

But, an increasing number has been coming from New York state.

And, and that's interesting to me of like, okay, there's a trend happening here, but, you know, what does that actually say?

So I want to open up that question of kind of the bigger picture of it.

Why is it important for us to know where exactly the guns are coming from, especially if they're coming from a place like Ohio that has I mean, you know, all you have to do is have a pulse to go in there and buy a handgun.

Essentially, if we know that and we know that trend is happening, that a lot of them are coming from out of state, there's not really much we can do about it.

Right?

There's not a ton we can do to stem the flow.

No, I, I disagree I totally disagree with that.

I think there's a lot that we can do about it if the data matters.

You know, we look at our RPD, portal, it tells you a lot of information, but then there's a lot of information that's missing.

This information with this data is evidence and and supply and crime.

The guns and tracking these, time to crime.

Guns are is very, very important.

66% came from out of the state for dealers.

Georgia, Ohio, Florida alone.

When the first gun trace data report came out in 2023 that showed there were some from Pennsylvania, there was some from new Jersey, those have now been banned.

And then some of those guns were even used that at killing officers in those same areas, those same gun dealers which who are now shut down the gun trace in New York, dealers rose from 22% in 2022 to 32% in 2025.

62% of New York State guns came from Monroe County dealers.

This is speaking to your point and why I disagree.

So we know who these as a barbershop person for years, people coming to shop and say the guns are coming from the corner stores, the guns are coming from this.

Everyone's giving these examples of where they think these guns.

So I, I wanted to answer that question, where are these guns actually coming from?

They're like cars.

They have Social Security.

They have they're all have identification.

So we ought to be able to trace this and find out.

And what we found out before we had to redact the first and second report because of the Tiahrt Amendment, we found out exactly what gun dealers are there.

These guns are coming from.

And to your point, to my point of the disagreement with that particular point, is that if we start holding these gun dealers accountable, the bad ones most of them are doing a great job, majority of them, but there's only like 3% that are there causing this problem.

But they're making up the majority of the crime guns in these seven zip codes.

We have to hold them accountable.

Get anything out of there?

Yes.

I mean, one of the things that is, it's interesting for us because there's not gun dealers in the city of Rochester, so there's none that fall under our jurisdiction.

But at the same time, knowing where some of these guns are coming from and working with our partners, agencies, because obviously we have task force officers with ATF and ATF has been a phenomenal partner to us, and working with them and targeting.

Because the other aspect of it is our offenders are worst gun offenders.

They don't just commit gun crimes in the city of Rochester.

They're going and getting the guns from somewhere.

They're going in.

And, you know, yes, it is sometimes from the corner stores and yes, you know, there's a big you know what this report misses.

And unfortunately I don't know how you would track it is that there is an underground market.

And so, you know, at the initial box store, big box store, it might be the initial, but when that gun stolen that can then pass his hands multiple times and that's not reported, that's not, in that underground market.

And unfortunately we do have quite a bit of violence associated with gun transactions going wrong.

Right?

Right.

When one illegally somebody illegally possessing a handgun, selling it to somebody else illegally to illegally, because that's how I got.

And none of that is tracked.

That's impossible to track that.

But knowing where those guns are coming from, knowing or that pipeline is coming from to work with our partners, it's it was weird on the report a few years ago when it popped up that, a gun from like, five guns from the same pawnshop in Georgia or some somewhere down south.

It was used in a multitude of crimes here in Rochester.

And so it's how does that get here?

And that's where working with those partners, working on that intelligence side of things.

And then also tracking our offenders.

Okay.

If somebody we know that's a known shooter keeps making trips to Georgia, what are they doing?

Right?

Right.

Or keeps making trips to some of these spots that pop up to help kind of piece some of our investigations together.

So it's great information to have, and it's great to work with our partners and and to hold some of them accountable, especially when, you know, you know, known offenders or known, guys involved in group violence, that sort of thing are in Georgia, or in Ohio or in some of those places.

And.

Okay, what are they up to and what are they tracking back here as well?

Or the easier to track the straw purchases like a person that, oh, I know a guy in Georgia who can buy it for me and then I can come and pick it up or someone who's local that can, you know, I know a guy who's got a permit.

He'll go buy a pistol and he'll hand it over to me.

Is that easier to track of the release?

It's some level of paper trail.

I know a lot of stolen, but a lot, A lot of stolen.

And then, you know, not a ton around permits.

And that's where some of these other states come in, where New York is pretty stringent in terms of buying, purchasing, especially a handgun, going on a permit and a being tied to you.

So that's a that's kind of a tough one.

And that's where, you know, against some of these other states where things aren't as simple or things are more, more simple than it is here.

And, you know, you can argue multiple different ways in the Second Amendment.

But at the end of the day, these these guns are ending up being used here in violence.

And that's where there's law enforcement.

We got to continue to do our work to stem that flow.

I mean, we've already got, I believe, over 250 crime guns this year alone that have been recovered by our PD.

We're not even halfway through the year, which is phenomenal.

And then, you know, you're going outside of this report as well.

The report mentions a bit ghost guns are become more and more of a problem.

You know, the first report, when it came out, we talked a lot about polymer 80 that we, I believe is out of business.

Yeah.

There's a company from out of state.

I want to say Arizona somewhere out that way that made a business out of selling 80% finished handguns.

And they would send you the handgun ID come in, come with a mold, you know, drill here, put a pin in there.

And now you've got 100% handgun that's on serialized.

And, that's that company's been shut down New York State because of laws, that have been on the books the last few years.

Some newer laws regarding, ghost guns.

But at the same time, now, the they're being replaced by 3D printed guns.

We're running into more and more 3D printed guns and 3D printed parts, things like the, the switches, to turn guns, fully automatic attached back of clocks.

Those are becoming more and more common.

And we've got eight of them already this year.

So it turns, you know, a Glock or or a handgun, not just Glocks, but the Stryker fired handguns, turns them into fully automatic guns and machine guns.

And those are those are incredibly dangerous.

And so, especially on a privately manufactured firearm on a 3D printed gun with a 3D printed switch.

That's, that's asking for a lot of problems.

And also not exactly difficult to do if you got a 3D printer and you got a schematic, you can you can get it done right.

And and incredibly difficult to police to.

And how can you actually stop people from it?

You can't ban 3D printers.

Yeah.

So, what exactly can you do to stop.

And I did I don't know if they made up a significant portion of the total gun traces right now, but there's more.

Well, we could what we could advocate for, though, is supporting laws requiring 3D printer safety firmware.

So there's there's something you can do there to kind of, not allow certain firmware to be sold.

And we know we can never like with the trafficking, there's always going to be that black market type of thing going on that's going to happen in almost anything that's of value.

Right.

And so we're we're never going to necessarily totally eradicate that underground thing, stuff that's going on.

Hopefully that we could, we could when we, when we're catching individuals that are involved in those types of crime, the police are doing that type of work that they can, you know, does then where they can discover, you know, some of these, these big organizations that are doing this kind of stuff.

But I do think there are some, some laws, some, some things that we can do to, to help to kind of, hold people accountable.

The gun, the Brady's gun dealer code of conduct could be helpful.

And we asked the coalition asked all of our county, supervisors to send that letter to gun dealers in their communities because, again, Rochester has no licensed gun dealers within its city limits.

So we know we were dealing with, suburban, gun dealers.

And we asked all of them to adhere to, the Brady's gun dealer code of conduct.

We could strengthen oversight of high risk dealers.

We continue to analyze and publish this data because this data is part of a picture.

Data matters.

And, I think that that's something that it helps us to, use various tools in the toolbox to support law enforcement.

But I'm always careful to when, when, when people try to, you know, one person doesn't do this.

You know, one entity doesn't do this, right?

The coalition is made up and the community of of of a lot of people.

So in my opinion, to see these numbers going down and the trending that we're having, even though one homicide, one shooting is one homicide, one shooting too many, and hopefully we can get to a place where we have zero.

But we know that that's, you know, maybe not, something that is really possible, in the world that we live on, unfortunately.

But we are striving to get to that point.

But what we realize is that the this, this community has made a decision that they don't want this happening in our community.

So we support law enforcement.

We're supporting our local elected officials.

We're supporting collectively the work of the individuals from boots on the ground to academia, etc., to work collaboratively and collectively to educate and advocate around not only gun violence, but violence in our community and so I really want to say, hats off to all of those people who names never get told they're never on TV and never on the radio show.

They're never, you know, in front of a camera.

But they're doing this work every day tirelessly because this is tiresome, tiresome work.

And and they don't, you know, and they don't oftentimes get mentioned because people, you know, say, hey, well, we we did it.

It's because of us or because, you know, and I and I say it's a collective, collaborative effort among this community.

Rochester says we're better than that.

I do want to talk a bit about the the Second Amendment argument here.

That and, you know, this is kind of a very big picture on all of this.

But when we're talking about what's happening here, we're looking at these trace data reports, and we know that a very large portion of these guns are coming from states where you don't need a permit to buy a handgun with a handgun normally isn't tracked very well, where, as in comparison to New York, where we have pretty strict gun laws.

And then there's two arguments you can make.

I think that very pro Second Amendment people will say, well, these gun laws don't do anything to prevent shootings from happening, while more gun control, oriented people would say, well, they're only happening because other states don't have these laws.

So it's a tricky thing.

And I was just wondering what your thoughts are on what policy you think could change on a federal or state level that could actually have a meaningful effect on how many illegal guns are ending up on the street?

All right.

So my role is not policy legislative.

That's not the part that's fair.

Right.

And at the end of the day, whether the gun is legally owned or illegally owned, responsible gun ownership is is the primary concern.

Amen.

Amen.

And so getting into, you know, different states and all of that array has a different views.

We enforce the laws that are on the books.

But being responsible with your gun ownership is the number one thing.

You know, keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and we have criminals.

And I think every state.

Yes.

If you've got a history of shooting people and convicted of shooting people until they go for you to.

That's right.

No matter where you go.

And so trying to a responsible gun owners, wherever you got that gun legally, making sure that you don't lose that gun.

So people leaving guns in unlocked glove boxes or people leaving guns in trucks or people, you know, variety of things, leaving them in bathrooms, leaving home.

I mean, you should hear some of the stories.

So, you know, responsible going to gun ownership is huge.

And then number two, if you're getting to the root cause of crime, because not every violence incident is gun based.

And so, you know, a gun makes it easy, but at the same time, there's, there's root causes of crime, and and it extends beyond the firearm itself.

you know, we can target gun violence here in the city of Rochor, and we do, that's a big part.

But at the same time, we have to get to those root causes and then get back to responsible gun ownership, because far too often we can look at the vast majority.

If you trace back these guns there, bought, a lot of them are brought at big box stores.

Somebody's not walking into, you know, a parolee that shoot somebody.

Right.

Isn't walking into, you know, dicks or wherever.

And legally buying the gun and then going shooting somebody with it the next night.

That's that's a rare thing.

These big guns are the vast majority are, the underground market, the black market, whatever you want to call it.

And so keeping those guns from there, keeping them in the legal gun owners hands and keeping them out of that underground market from the corner stores that you mentioned, places along those lines to where those guns are being used for nefarious action.

And that's the big difference, is, you know, supporting those that legally own guns.

And at the same time, enforcement on those that are not legally owning guns and they're using those firearms for, for negative consequences.

Yeah, I, I couldn't agree more.

I see, you know, ditto to everything that was said, and I and I and I'll be clear and transparent.

I am a licensed gun owner, you know what I'm saying?

So I'm not against, owning a gun.

I'm not a guy.

I think that you should have the right to be able to do that and bear arms.

And you should have the right to, do that, safely.

And, and and do it in a respectful, responsible way.

However I do, I would say I would look further at just what the states are doing in cities and say, what about countries?

Look at what other country some other countries haven't had homicides, at all.

You know, I often hear the mayor, you know, speak to that point.

When we just released a second country data report, he he spoke today how he's a part of the, City of mayors and, Council of Mayors and how they look at what's happening in these other countries and how these other countries don't have this American problem.

They don't have this gun violence problem in some of these countries.

So clearly there's some policy, there's something that's happening there.

That's, that's, that's that's in place.

That's not allowing people to feel that they have the ability to do that.

So I think we have to look beyond just our local laws, and we have to look abroad at what's happening, in these other countries.

What are they doing to decrease or almost eliminate, violence that's happening in, in, in their country.

So as we're kind of going through this process of, trying to, you know, mitigate our shootings to cut down our shootings, Greg, I remember talking to you, probably about a year ago, about some of the efforts that the city was having and, some of the cities that they were looking at, it's like kind of I don't know if models would be the right word, but, some of the approach they have at Boston, I think was one of the big ones.

We, we're looking at at the time that Boston has an A extremely low homicide rate.

I actually I was kind of stunned how low it is.

And, I haven't checked the numbers for this year, but I don't I don't think it's trended back up.

So, I think that was mentioned as one of the ones that were like, you're looking at what they're doing there, but you know, any other places that we're we're looking at right now like, hey, something they're doing is working and, we need to be doing the same thing here.

Right?

So yeah.

So we were talking especially during when we participated in the public Safety partnership.

So that's the other angle I wanted to talk about today was was, you know, we talked earlier about some of our prevention methods, but another prevention method that we also have is holding people accountable.

And so for example, we started a non-fatal shooting unit, in the last year or two, and our non-fatal shooting closure rate has gone from around 10% to, as a month ago, we're almost 50%, non-fatal shootings.

And so, holding people accountable, if you want a fire gun in our city streets, you're going to be held accountable for that.

And so training a lot of us goes under a model of treating even non-fatal shooting, similar to homicides in terms of the technician work that goes into it.

So the investigative work, the district attorney's office has been a great partner, bringing us assistant DA's to the scene, because oftentimes somebody from the DA's office in plainclothes is we'll get different cooperation in terms of witnesses and victims than we will.

And, so we've gone from the past of, you know, non-fatal shooting victim, somebody shooting the like for shot in the like, for example, it doesn't want to cooperate.

We'd close it out, victim uncooperative, and we'd move on.

And instead, now we're really looking at this, okay?

We might not be able to charge the assault, but we're still going to investigate the shooting.

Because shooting a gun on our streets is unacceptable.

And, so we're still catching suspects and charging them with with weapons charges, reckless endangerment charges, other things that, you know, don't necessarily require that shooting victim to be cooperative on.

And we've closed out a significant amount of shootings that way as well.

And so, and then beyond that, we've had some issues in the past.

There's been no secret in terms of some of our gun arrests and, and, you know, some of the prosecution here in New York, not prosecution, but some of the laws in terms of, our suspects just getting out the next day.

And, some things along those lines.

And so we we've been working with our federal partners at ATF.

And so every gun arrests that we make now, we have a 24 over seven on call, ATF agent, somebody from the task force that's available to, in real time, evaluate all of our gun cases, and there's a, going through and evaluating what the best prosecution is.

And so the U.S.

Attorney's Office and the ATF have been great partners in terms of federal prosecution.

That's there are more violent offenders and some of our worst offenders, you know, taking the prosecution down that road.

And, so looking at each gun case as well, individually of what the best prosecution is, what's the best outcome for everybody involved?

And again, ATF and U.S.

Attorney's Office, the Marshals Service, in tracking some of these guys down, just great partnerships at the federal level as well.

Can I ask you thank you for bringing that up, too, because, and this is what I speak to, how the collective when when you have, what the uniqueness of Rochester has of us all coming together and seeing how we can solve this, this issue, and all the great things that come as a result of that, the many minds in 2018 when we were also touting to we averaged 20 to 30 homicides.

Around that time, we had 89.9% arrest rate for homicides.

But we had an extremely low arrest rate for shootings.

The collective got together and said, hey, there's.

And at that time, Doctor Heimer from our right.

Others were on the coalition at the time, and we noticed a gap there that could possibly be filled.

Let's start treating, the shootings, as would an investor court to vest to, to excuse my, missing that that word, response, the same response that we do with homicides because we're obviously doing a great job there.

Almost nine out of ten homicides are being closed.

And people are being arrested.

But on the on the shooting side, that wasn't happening.

So what are we doing different?

So one of the recommendations out of 2018 2019 solution action plan for the Rock Against Gun Rights Coalition was to change that, to treat the shootings like homicides with the same type of investigation.

And so our response, as well as many other recommendations and did in 2023, we released another solution action plan.

I think almost all of the solution solutions that we recommended collectively have all been implemented.

And so this is when I say when the collective comes together to solve a problem, or I think and what we've seen here is that these things are working and police are doing their job.

The community is doing trying to do their job with coming forward with more information, quicker, more often.

The city is doing a better job of dealing with the victims.

That which is also leading to more, information coming forward because they're getting more of a response, from the from the city.

And it's a, it's a comprehensive response and a consistent response, not just, you know, somebody because somebody is well known on on the East side.

They get all these people trying to help them.

But then, you know, we have a homicide on the, on West Side.

Nobody knows this person and they don't get that help.

Now, you have a a collective, consistent, same response for every victim in this city.

And that wasn't happening before.

And I think and I want to add that, that that along with the, the the suppression and the education and all of the things that the that the police department is doing, collectively, these things are showing positive results.

Sorry, going on that frankly, it's it's the, the work that our officers are.

Yes.

Absolutely.

I mean, just it just in the ten minute, just in the last 5 or 10 minutes while you were talking, I got pictures of a gun sent to me because our tactical unit was out tracking robbery suspects that ran from them.

So they had a chase for the robbery suspect that threw a handgun.

That's a dangerous situation.

A violent suspect just threw a gun while the officers were chasing him.

Just in the last couple of hours.

And then also on that note, we just had a, you know, our longer term cases are homicide type cases.

Just this morning, Demir Bailey just pled guilty to the murder of Sandra Blanding last year over on Spencer Street.

So.

And we were getting those good results.

And that's our officers.

Are detectives putting that work in?

That's right.

You know, I can sit here and say 257 crime gone so far this year.

As of this morning, every one of those guns has some sort of danger risk factor story behind it that our officers are out there doing, in 258, because we just got another one this morning.

But that's, that takes work.

That takes risk.

We've had, you know, 4 or 5 officers shot in the past year.

You know, we just had an officer shot in March that was stepping out with with a violent suspect.

We had three officers shot in December as part of a domestic, you know, we had the incident in June or July last summer where the homicide suspect in and around, just barely, you know, right by the head of our captain.

That video went around.

I mean, we've had, you know, a lot of violence towards our officers as well.

And they're out there continuing out there.

Everyone else, they're still showing up at the start of their shift and going out there and getting guns like that.

Just again, this morning.

Yeah.

And that's why we I said that's why I started with prayer because I was like, we're we really pray for our officers and our first responders out there because they're really in harm's way.

And we can't you know, I was on city council as chair of public safety.

I made sure and I say this, you know, you know, because it's just a truth.

We wanted to make sure that they had everything, every tool that they need to do their job, all the resources they needed to do their job.

And I tell you that the state has done a good job, with providing, the different programs that they have and the funding that they have in order to be able to do some of the work as well as ATF with that new machine.

What is the machine called again, captain?

Well, we.

Have a knife in machine two.

Of them now, right in.

Our building.

Yes.

Which is what it's just.

So now I've been it's, integrated ballistics network so we can take a casing from a crime scene.

We take that ballistic evidence, and we have the machine gun on site to scan that machine.

Our technicians are trained in it and get it put right into the ATF network.

And tracking guns.

And it's a game changer.

Rather than waiting months at times for the for the lab to do it, we can do it same day.

And so that, so, for example, that gun we just collected this morning within, some point today or tomorrow, that gun will be test fired.

That casing will be taken to our 19 machine and entered into the federal database.

And, we start to match that gun up to potentially match that gun up to other crimes.

So if.

It was used in a shooting in South Carolina, you would know about it.

Correct.

Or used at any of our other shootings.

And so oftentimes one of the weigh in on the intelligence side of things, I sit and, we have a group violence meeting with all of our partner agencies, I believe weekly every other week.

And, part of that is going through.

Okay.

We had the shots fired on.

Sorry, Jefferson F, and we can look at and say, okay, we don't have any arrests.

Nobody was struck.

But at the same time, okay.

The shot fired on Jefferson AV last week.

That gun was also used for a shots fired on Roy Croft the week before on this street the week before that, and that other street the week before that.

Okay.

Who do we know that is common to those areas?

Yes.

Who do we know we could start building up in real time, not six months or a year later with, oh yeah, we're in trial now.

And that gun was associated with this, that scene.

So you start to, really develop who's involved in disputes and what disputes are going on.

And a much more real time basis where you can start taking action associated with it.

And so knowing, you know, this gun was also just used in Syracuse.

Okay.

Great.

What did we have in Syracuse two weeks ago or what did they have.

And we could start to work with those other agencies as well.

We're gonna take some calls.

The four of them are gonna take our only break of the hour, and, we'll be back, talk some more.

I'm Megan Mack, coming up in our second hour.

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This is putting it together later for trial.

It's awesome.

All right, we are back.

We're going to take a couple calls.

Our first one is Jack and grease.

So hi.

Thank you for taking my call.

Of course.

I, I have a question.

I have a comment and, and a question, and by the way, I really appreciate the conversation.

Even though I live in a town of grease.

Obviously, I two of our children live in the city, and we try and attend as many concerts and plays and events as we can in the city.

So my question, and I really appreciate the comments.

I don't didn't catch them the same with the representative from the police department.

But early on in the conversation was a mention of perception versus reality.

That, good.

That is that is dropping.

But my question for the group is I'm in New York, conversations with other cities around the country, cities that where possibly where people feel much, much safer.

What the data tell you, what is the environment, what is the communication set up that other cities have where people feel safer than they might hear, say, in Rochester or some other New York State city?

And my other comments had to do with, your comments about trying to stop gun flow.

I probably feel as strongly as anybody on here about the Second Amendment and how it's being abused by whether it's gun dealers or whatever.

What the reality is, that's a national level issue.

You should separate that my opinion from what you do locally.

You can advocate at the state level to try and get other states to stop what they're doing, to shift guns here.

But you can't.

There is no border.

I can easily travel to any state in the Union without any borders.

Now, let me check in what I'm bringing back.

So we have we have a second Amendment.

I don't agree with everything that's in there, but anybody in anybody can get a gun and you can have a gun that can be converted, like you said, to a machine gun, and you can't stop it.

So that's my point.

Thank you for joining, Nicole.

Thank you.

So I think, Jack brings up an interesting point that I kind of touched at the start of the hour is, yes, we do have this trend happening, but the perception of crime in the city is we were talking before, we went on the air.

Is some people are very dedicated to the idea that crime is much worse than it might be, or that the city is more unsafe than it really is.

And I think some of it is very valid.

I mean, when you think of the incidents that just happened over the past few days, you had a a man stabbed to death outside of a bar and a very tragic incident, and another incident of a man having his hand chopped off, and another extremely violent incident that happened.

And when these things are very rapidly spread around social media, they're plastered on the TV news.

It's yes, of course we can make the the very valid argument that violent crime is always going to happen.

It always is happening.

And, we should be aware of it.

But at the same time, if someone's only perception of what's happening in the city is, being kind of shown this, these very violent incidents over and over and over and over, I don't think you can blame them for having the perception that it is getting worse or it is just completely untenable.

So yeah, I to Jack's point, I'd like to get your thoughts on that of like the perception versus the reality of what's happening.

Yeah.

So so I'm going to a couple answers on that.

Number one is, you know, we've got to continue spreading our message.

It's tough to come out and say, and I know that we're kind of talking that the reality of it, but we're not going to go out and celebrate, violence reductions, because it's still too much violence.

Right?

So we're never going to celebrate that.

We're never gonna have a party and say, hey, only 49 people are shot halfway through the year, almost halfway through the year, because that's 49 too many people shot.

So one of the things I encourage people to do is educate themselves.

So, our social media platforms out there, whether it be Ax, Instagram, Facebook, you just Google Rochor Police Department, social media and you'll find our channels, where we're out there showing what we're doing.

And that's a lot of the community engagement that we're doing, some of the big arrests that we're doing and getting that out there.

Because unfortunately, a lot of times when you just look at the news is it attaches Rochester versus the entire region.

So you can see a crime just laughed, unfortunately.

But on one of the news channels that was there talking about crime that occurred outside of the county and the Heteros Rochester, it had nothing to do with the city of Rochester.

It just gets associated because of the Rochester region.

Number two is a lot of the local media around here, and this is true in other cities, but a lot of local media, that's what drives them is is emergency response.

It's easy.

It's easy.

You can rest easy.

You can write it up and drive complex.

And oftentimes my press releases are written are verbatim.

And and I want to charge some of these news channels for stealing my writing because it's.

Literally.

Cut and paste.

Right, exactly.

You know, and so there's that aspect of things of that, no matter where the crime occurs or where the car accident occurred, at car accidents and rocks and big things or what dominated a lot of the news coverage around here.

And that's unfortunate.

It may piss some people off, but whatever.

I a reporter that left here years ago, they still maintain contact with, within a year of being in a much bigger market.

Similar violence issue came back and told me if somebody ran into it.

Crime scenes all the time always say on the corner with the camera live from the shooting scene.

And this person told me that in their new market, which similar level violence, that they had only covered one shooting in the first six months.

They were there because it was it was.

No, we're fully staffed.

We have the ability to go out.

Shootings happen unless it's a, you know, something unique, something outside of the norm.

Our headline is not shooting, shooting, shooting every day.

Like, that's not news.

If it and was so blessed and so happy that they could go out and and find other news to cover instead of just, you know, lack of better terms, low hanging fruit, that's easy to cover.

And that person was thrilled to have moved on from this market.

And, you know, I can't begin to talk about the behind the scenes on the news or anything along those lines, but that's, I mean, myself.

I stopped looking at the news half the time because when I pull it up, it's always a breaking news of some crime incident.

There's police cars on on XYZ Street.

Oh, okay.

Right.

And that's a that just gets.

Split before they even know what is happening.

It's just right.

The picture of the cop car and, we'll keep you updated.

Yep.

And it's a false call.

But then you also know the headline of false call on Jefferson Avenue, right?

Right.

But if you don't mind, I just would like to speak to that as well as the caller.

First of all, thank you for that.

That that, that statement and the question, and your point from the caller, because it is real to especially depending on who you're talking to when you look at the gun trace data point, when you look at the data here in Rochester and is saying that 10% of the streets are causing 90% of the violence, seven of the ZIP code, seven of the ZIP codes are predominately the ones impacted by the crime guns.

Then if you go talk to those people, their perception is very different.

If you come and talk to me like we have Gino.

And you asked me that question in the barbershop, what do you think is safer?

Do you feel safer?

No.

I, even though I even though I see more police officers, even though they're doing their jobs, even though that.

But as a owner on Jefferson Avenue every day with a cash business.

Right.

I'm telling you that I be very careful how I conduct myself in that community, in that neighborhood.

All right.

So that's real for me, for what I see outside of my window on a daily basis.

So depending on who you go talk to, especially if you're talking to somebody in them, seven zip codes who are experiencing this on a daily basis and they're not driving home away from it, or are not exposed to it as, as prevalent as some are.

They may feel that the present, even though the numbers are down, they may still feel that because they're the most impacted and that impact has, results that come with that.

Now, part two of that is keeping the conversation ticking away from local and making it more state and federal.

I agree with that.

And that's why the coalition isn't as important, because we're not we're at we have a advocating arm where we're advocating for our local or our state representatives and our federal business to do their part, you know, and helping to, create legislation, policies, and things of that nature that could help to strengthen, our, our accountability person.

So I agree with that.

To again, to hold, you know, did this just not just a local conversation.

People are having this conversation leaders, law enforcement, clergy are having this conversation all over.

I'm leaving to go to Atlanta next week with the clergy for Safe Cities, cohort who are pastors from all over the country and, and in Toronto who are working on holiday eradicate this type of stuff in each one of our respective communities.

So this is not just obviously a Rochester problem, but Rochester gratefully, have been trending in the right area.

And I think that that's commendable to our law enforcement, to our mayors, to the people that are working on this stuff on a daily basis.

Yeah.

And I just like your comment on the media part of it, too.

I, I, I'm grateful I work in a place where we don't do that daily quick hate crime reporting.

I did it early in my career.

I don't really ever want to do it again.

And that doesn't mean that I don't write about crime.

I do, but it's usually you just have to take a tiny little bit of an extra step to contextualize it or try to understand what how does this actually, what makes this a story worth telling?

And just because an incident is flashy or the old idea of bleeds it leads, doesn't mean it's necessarily news.

It doesn't mean it's, good, effective journalism.

It just means that, you know, something is going to get clicks.

So you do it, and then after you do it, you are creating this perception of what the world is that might not, might lack some nuance.

And I think most violent incidents are usually interpersonal.

They usually stem from some kind of beef that two people have with each other.

And but when you just put out shooting happened on Legal Avenue and or shooting happened on North Clinton Avenue with no other context.

Well, what does the average person think?

If I go to the city, I'm going to get shot because it's randomly happening all the time, and we, a reasonable person knows that's not the case, but.

It's a it's a reasonable.

It was happening more in the suburbs until recently.

It was happening more in the suburbs than it was in the city, you know.

But by the by the numbers.

Anyway, I'm sorry, I get.

Yeah, but very rarely is it random.

And that's, you know, a a thing to remember, but and again, you know, we're not going to say crime doesn't exist.

Yeah.

But, it's very rarely random, especially the violent crime such as shootings and stabbings.

They're very rarely random.

Well, Yeah, that's our time.

Well, thank you both.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Definitely be talking more about this in the future, because this is, a never ending issue.

Of.

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