First published in The Record, Feb. 1, 2023

We can reduce gun deaths in poor cities like Paterson. politicians stand in the way.

Killer.

Gunshot victim.

Bringer of peace.

Kashif Eleby has been all three. Each its own genus of pain.

He killed a man, a stupid murder in a fight for no reason. Eleby knows this shame. He was shot in the back as he ran. Eleby knows this fear.

He warned his friend — wounded in a third gunfight — to calm down. If you shoot the man who shot you, the police will find you.

Eleby knows this dread.

“We’ve all been shot,” Eleby, 33, said of his fellow outreach workers at the Paterson Healing Collective, which tries to stop the city’s cycle of violence. “After that, you can be sitting in your house and not feel safe. Paranoia sets in.”

All three shootings in Eleby’s life happened over the course of 14 years in Paterson, his hometown. The last two happened six weeks apart, on the same street corner. In each, five people were wounded.

One person died. Her name was Monique Byrd. She was 15 years old.

After the third shooting, Eleby drove to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s University Medical Center in Paterson, where the gunshot victims were treated. Still in pain from his own wounds, he walked room to room, assuring that each victim had water, food and contact with their family. Later, when the patients left the hospital, Eleby warned them: Don’t get a gun. Don’t shoot the man who shot you. Don’t continue this cycle of death.

They knew Eleby spoke from experience, a man who once made the wrong decision and lost.

“I’m ashamed” of the mistakes, Eleby said. “You need to hear that from somebody who’s been through the ringer.”

A deadly stalemate

Among politicians, the argument over how to stop America’s cycle of gun violence remains contentious and undecided. Many conservatives argue the solution is to hire more cops, and make life harder for criminals.

“Want to stop crime?” Lee Zeldin, New York’s most recent Republican candidate for governor, tweeted in July 2021. “Support police MORE, not LESS. Hire more cops. Repeal cashless bail. Keep qualified immunity. Defend the rights of law abiding citizens & target criminals.”

Many liberals argue the answer lies in bringing education, jobs and trauma therapy to the small number of young men of all races responsible for the vast majority of violent crime.

“In Paterson we have the DEA, the ATF, the FBI, the state police, the sheriff’s department, Paterson police, probation officers, parole officers. Recently, we even had the Secret Service!” said Liza Chowdhury, director of the Paterson Healing Collective. “We’re spending millions of dollars on all these agencies, and we still can’t stop the shooting. Where’s the return on our investment?”

Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh tries to split the difference. When he talks of ending gun violence, he begins by listing the many grants, social services and job programs his administration has brought to the city’s most desperate neighborhoods.

Then he describes his efforts to hire more cops.

“We’re barely at 400 [police officers]," Sayegh said in a recent phone interview. “It’s like we're shoveling against the tide, because every time we hire new police officers, we lose officers because other municipalities can give more money, and probably less drama.”

The mayor also is skeptical of programs like the Paterson Healing Collective.

“I’m encouraged by the fact that they have community events and do outreach,” Sayegh said of Chowdhury’s group. “But I just want to see the data. Can you point to a reduction [in shootings]? And is it because we did the outreach to these shooting victims and prevented the next shooting?”

Shooting deaths go up. Then they go back down.

This political fight — cops versus community programs — never ends.

In poor cities like Paterson, and in well-funded universities and think tanks across the country, experts are beginning to think our politicians may be our greatest obstacle to change.

“The problem is politics,” said the Rev. James Staton, former president of Cease Fire Paterson, a community violence intervention group that predated the healing collective. “We already know what works.”

The answer is not more cops.

Nor is it more social programs.

The answer is both.

“That’s a fundamental problem with our current criminal justice conversation,” said Thomas Abt, a former New York City prosecutor and senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School who is now the founding director of the University of Maryland Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction. “It’s an either/or conversation where we either need more policing, or we need more alternatives to policing. And that’s a big mistake.”

Killer

Kashif Eleby did not attend the dance. His little brother did. The dance was held at St. Joseph’s Community Center on Paterson’s north end on March 29, 2008, a calm Friday night after a windy day. At the dance, a guy threatened Eleby’s brother. Eleby thought he knew who it was. But he wasn’t sure.

He grabbed a gun anyway. He tracked a group of young men to Temple Street, a few blocks from the center. He intended only to frighten the man he believed had made the threats, he said later, and warn everyone against harming his brother.

It was 1:30 in the morning. Eleby drew his gun. A fight broke out. Eleby fired. The bullet struck Kevin Brown, 19, in the chest. Brown collapsed and died.

Eleby understood his mistake immediately. Brown never threatened his brother. Eleby was 18. He would spend the next 14 years behind bars.

Two young Black men. One dead. The other's life destroyed by a series of decisions so dumb that now, at age 33, he looks back and can't understand them. 

"Because I’m like, damn,” Eleby said. “Did I fail myself? Or did my upbringing fail?”

Despite all the news coverage of crime since the outset of the Covid pandemic, most violent crime remains at historic lows. The United States experienced no increase in the number or rate of assaults or robberies in either 2020 or 2021, the most recent years for which data is available, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI.

The outlier is murder. America’s murder rate increased 30% in 2020, among the largest year-to-year jumps ever recorded, according to the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The murder rate continued to rise in 2021, both agencies found.

This rise in gun violence is concentrated in poor cities like Paterson. There were 123 shootings in the city in 2020, the highest in 30 years of modern record-keeping. The following year, 30 people were killed in Paterson, a new record for a city where 92% of people are not white, and a quarter of the population lives in poverty.

Gun violence in the city declined 26% in 2022, according to the New Jersey State Police. But most shootings remain concentrated in neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly Black and poor, forcing residents to live under constant threat.

“Violent crime among the most disadvantaged and disenfranchised people in the United States is a huge issue,” said Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice. “And we should be talking about it."

Victim

Kashif Eleby was already running when he felt the bullet slam into his back. He could tell it was bad by the pain. If the bullet pierced his lung, Eleby knew, he would die here, at the corner of Essex and Madison streets, a battleground in the fight to control the profitable business of selling drugs to people from the suburbs.

Eleby coughed into his hand. No blood. This was good. No blood meant the bullet had grazed the lung, but hadn’t punctured it.

He knew he had a chance to survive.

The shooting happened at 10:30 p.m. on May 11, 2022. A little while later, police officers stood above Eleby’s bed in the emergency room at St. Joseph’s hospital. They asked: Who shot you?

Eleby said he didn’t know.

The police continued their interrogation, according to Eleby’s memory of the exchange. Who shot you? We know you saw the shooter. Why are you covering for the guy who shot you? Jerry Speziale, Paterson’s police director, did not return calls seeking comment for this story.

“I’m like, bro, I just got shot in the back,” Eleby said, remembering the interrogation months later. “How could I see the shooter behind my back?”

Every day, police officers in Paterson risk their lives confronting drug dealers and arresting violent criminals. They do so despite earning $25,000 less per year on average than other New Jersey cops, according to a database created by NJ.com.

Yet to many Paterson residents, the city’s Police Department appears out of control. One former police sergeant recently started a 33-month prison term for leading a gang of Paterson officers who targeted residents for robbery and assault. A former officer faces two separate criminal investigations over assaults. And in early January, a federal judge allowed a lawsuit against the city to continue by Shaquana Duncan, who accuses Paterson police of using excessive force that led to the death of her son, Jameek Lowery, in 2019.

Sayegh, the mayor, emphasizes that many of these scandals started years ago.

“We recognize there have been issue in the past, because those rogue cops predated my administration,” the mayor said.

But for many residents, fear of Paterson cops abusing their power remains as fresh as ever.

“Police officers operate on the premise that their mere presence prevents crime,” said Zellie Thomas, an activist with Paterson’s chapter of Black Lives Matter. “And in communities of color, the police officers themselves are committing crime.”

It’s not just young leftists who accuse Paterson police of preying on people. Staton, the Paterson minister and advocate, is 68. A former City Council member, he recently retired as president of Cease Fire Paterson, which focused police attention and social services on the handful of young men causing most of the city’s violent crime.

Many cops know Staton. But to some who don’t, Staton said, he’s just another Black man in Paterson.

“When I see police officers who don’t know me, or if I don’t have a collar on, I get treated differently. I’m disrespected,” Staton said recently. “I think most people on the police force have good intentions. But an element of them don’t care, and they’re trying to take advantage. That means people don’t trust the police.”

The mayor and police officials fired officers accused of wrongdoing. But residents including Eleby and Staton criticize Sayegh for opposing institutional reforms to prevent Paterson cops from abusing their power. The city has no civilian board to monitor alleged fraud and abuse by police, four years after the mayor first proposed one. And Sayegh opposes a measure, similar to one implemented by Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, that diverted 5% of the city’s police budget to community anti-violence programs. In 2020, the first year of the ordinance, Newark spent $11.4 million on its new Office of Violence Prevention.

Paterson can’t afford such a program, Sayegh said, due partly to budget cuts in 2011 that forced the city to eliminate 125 police officer jobs.

“We’re still trying to recover” from the layoff, Sayegh said.

While problems within the Police Department remain unsolved, community programs to stop the violence in Paterson survive under constant existential threat, as when Paterson Cease Fire lost all state funding when Chris Christie became governor in 2010. The group never recovered, Staton said.

“Boom. Funding pulled,” Staton said. “It was hellacious.”

Now the healing collective rides the same funding roller coaster. The Murphy administration gave the group $1.3 million in federal money in 2018. Four years later, in 2022, Murphy cut the funding to zero. A month later he backed down, tapping a different federal grant to keep the collective going.

Most years, the police budget in Paterson is consistent. Community organizations working with the same group of potentially violent offenders know no such luxury

“I always tell my staff that we’re one tragic death away from losing funding,” Chowdhury said.

With no institutional police reform, and no assurances that community violence intervention programs will continue, tensions between Paterson cops and residents remain high. As Eleby lay in his hospital bed, reeling from a gunshot wound and woozy from painkillers, the police officers kept accusing him of protecting the shooter, he said.

He felt a growing anger. Why were the cops treating a victim like a criminal?

“I’m laying in the hospital bed,” Eleby said. “I’m naked. I’m vulnerable. And you’re in here questioning me. And when people feel vulnerable like that, they lash out.”

Bringer of peace

Six weeks after Eleby was shot at the intersection of Essex and Madison streets, the corner erupted again in gunfire. Again, five people were shot. Again, all five were taken to St Joseph’s hospital.

This time, however, Eleby was a trained outreach worker with the Paterson Healing Collective.

“Some of the people who got shot are in there crying. Some are throwing temper tantrums,” Eleby said. “So I hug them, and tell them it’s going to be all right. I’m hugging their mothers.”

One victim was a man Eleby considers like a little brother. He was shot in both legs. After the victim left the hospital, Eleby visited the young man at home. The man was scared, angry and talking about retaliation.

“He was being stubborn,” Eleby said. “He’s like, ‘But buzz, they shot me!’”

Eleby tapped into his own experience.

“Who shot you? You don’t know,” Eleby told his friend. “You’re gonna go out there and kill? And now that’s another innocent person dead.”

Paterson has plenty of guns. The young man could easily find one. So far, he hasn’t.

“Some organizations wouldn’t know how to deal with that,” Eleby said. “But I know most of these people. I’ve been in the same place they are.”

Neither the Paterson Healing Collective nor the police can keep the city safe. After Eleby was shot last May, Paterson cops arrested 32 alleged drug dealers in four separate sweeps of Essex, Madison and the surrounding neighborhood.

And on Oct. 15, 2022, at 1:40 in the morning, another round of gunfire erupted at the corner of Madison and Essex. Bullets wounded three people.

“We’re never going to be able to prevent every single crime,” Eleby said of the healing collective.

Nor should they be expected to, crime prevention experts say. People who commit violent crimes must understand they will face serious consequences — arrest, long prison sentences — if they reoffend. Such accountability can be imposed only by police departments viewed as legitimate. Cases of fraud and wanton violence, like recent ones in Paterson, destroy all trust that police officers need to conduct investigations, and close homicide cases.

“If you engage with people who actually live this stuff, they have a more nuanced view than all the ideologues,” said Abt, the crime researcher. “We need criminal justice reform. We need this system to treat us better. But we still need this system.”

Police cannot do the work alone. Nor can the Paterson Healing Collective. Rather than a single organization favored with state and federal grants, a city like Paterson needs several groups, Abt said, each using a different evidence-based approach to interrupt violence.

“There’s enough evidence to show they have an effect,” Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research & Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said of community-based programs. “They’re incredibly cheap compared to law enforcement. And they don’t have the negative side effects of law enforcement.”

In Paterson, following these best practices would mean creating new systems of accountability to catch and remove dirty, violent cops. And it would mean stable, long-term funding for the Paterson Healing Collective, Cease Fire Paterson and other programs working to improve the life prospects for the couple hundred young men responsible for most of the shootings.

“We know what works,” Staton said. “We just have to be consistent about it. You need both enforcement and social programs.”

It means finding young men like Kashif Eleby back when he was 18, before he got a gun and drove angry into the night. It means convincing him by whatever means necessary — the threat of prison, the calm of therapy, the promise of a job — to put down the gun and consider his options.

“Police don’t believe in mediation,” Eleby said. “That’s where we come in.”