Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at a protest by middle-school students in Brooklyn. We’ll also find out about a settlement in a defamation lawsuit about a TV series on the Central Park Five case.
More than 100 middle school students in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, are expected to take part in a walkout this morning.
It will not be a walkout in the usual sense of the word. Their school, the Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School, is encouraging them to join a protest against gun violence in partnership with Save Our Streets Brooklyn, a community organization.
The students have studied gun violence in recent months. In language arts classes, they read the young-adult novel “Give a Boy a Gun.” In math, they worked out statistics on gun violence. In science, they looked at whether gun violence met the definition of an epidemic.
“The essential question was, Is gun violence considered a health crisis in the U.S.?” said Janeé Wright, a science teacher at the school. “They had their question in the back of their minds through all of this.”
“All of this” included reading up on disease-related outbreaks like the coronavirus pandemic and the influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920 — and on how epidemiologists classify such occurrences. “When they realized what epidemiologists do, they applied that to gun violence,” she said.
The material they covered in class, like today’s walkout, was planned long before a 12-year-old was arrested Monday in the fatal shooting of a 15-year-old cousin in an apartment less than two miles from the school. Dushoun Almond, who runs the anti-violence group Brownsville In Violence Out, said that family members had told him the boys had been playing with the gun when it went off.
There were at least 15 fatal shootings in or near that block from 2020 to 2023, according to a New York Times interactive map that plotted every fatal gun incident in the United States in that time. (You can look up your own block here and compare data on gun homicides in your neighborhood with others around the country.)
There were six within a five-minute walk of Wright’s school in the same period.
Gun violence increased with the pandemic: From 2020 to 2023, half of New Yorkers lived near at least one fatal shooting — 12 percentage points above the national average for large cities in the same period. The Times’s analysis found unexpected hot spots in Queens, where one in every three residents lived near at least one fatal shooting from 2020 to 2023, up from just over one in five from 2016 to 2019.
Shooting incidents in New York this year were down nearly 12 percent from 2023, according to police statistics through June 2. But in the precinct that includes Brownsville, there were 24 shooting incidents through Sunday, including the shooting involving the two boys — eight more than in the same period last year.
Mayor Eric Adams announced an ambitious public safety plan in 2022 that included putting more police officers on the streets to remove guns and reviving an anti-gun police unit that had been disbanded in 2020 amid social justice protests. Adams, a former police captain who was elected after promising to crack down on crime, also appointed a “gun violence czar.” And the Police Department says it has taken close to 2,800 guns off the streets this year — and close to 16,400 since Adams became mayor two and a half years ago.
“The mayor has done some things that I think are remarkably smart,” said Warren Eller, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, citing community programs that he said Adams doesn’t get enough credit for. But he cautioned that those programs take time. “These community programs are going to go a lot further” toward bringing down gun violence, he said, “but they’re probably going to take a lot longer than Mayor Adams’s tenure in office.”
Wright said the students had analyzed shootings using an interactive tool similar to the one that The Times used. They were also assigned to field work. That meant going to different places in Crown Heights and asking people if they had been affected by gun violence.
The students “were surprised how willing people were to tell their stories,” Wright said. “I made the point to them — you see the headlines, the major shootings,” she said, “but sometimes you don’t realize how many are happening in your own neighborhood.”
Weather
Expect patchy fog this morning and clouds this afternoon, with temperatures in the high 70s. Showers and possibly a thunderstorm are likely this evening, with lows in the high 60s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until June 12 (Shavuot).
The latest New York news
Linda Fairstein and Netflix settle her defamation lawsuit
Fairstein led the sex crimes unit in the Manhattan district attorney’s office in 1989, when five Black and Latino teenagers were charged with the rape of a white female jogger in Central Park. They were convicted in part because of false confessions obtained by the police. Their convictions were overturned after the actual assailant confessed in 2002, and they won a $41 million settlement from the city in 2014. One of the five, Yusef Salaam, was elected to the City Council last year.
News of the settlement was followed by dueling statements from Fairstein and her lawyers, and DuVernay and Netflix’s lawyers. The case had been scheduled to go to trial on Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
Fairstein will not get any money as part of the settlement. Netflix will donate $1 million to the Innocence Project, which works to exonerate people who claim they were wrongfully convicted.
She said in her separate statement that the case had not been “about winning’ or about any financial restitution, but about my reputation and that of my colleagues.”
“It was about setting the historical record straight that the villainous caricature invented by the defendants and portrayed onscreen was not me,” she said, noting that Netflix was moving part of a disclaimer — which says that certain characters and events in the series are fictionalized — to the beginning of “When They See Us,” from the closing credits, where it already appeared.
Bart Williams and Natalie Spears, lawyers who represented Netflix, called the outcome “a total victory for Netflix” and for DuVernay and Locke. “Any suggestion by Linda Fairstein that she was vindicated by bringing this lawsuit is ludicrous,” they said in a statement.
DuVernay, in a statement emailed a couple of hours after Fairstein’s, said she hoped that Fairstein “can come to terms with the part she played in this miscarriage of justice.” She also asserted that Fairstein had “walked away” after proposing a cash payout and a disclaimer that would have said that “everything to do with her in the show was fabricated.”
“We refused both,” DuVernay said.
Andrew Miltenberg, a lawyer for Fairstein, pointed to a ruling by the judge last fall that rejected a dismissal motion from Netflix and DuVernay. The judge, P. Kevin Castel, said there was evidence that the series had “reverse-engineered plot points to attribute actions, responsibilities and viewpoints to Fairstein that were not hers” and were not reflected in “the substantial body of research materials” that had been amassed before the series went into production.
METROPOLITAN diary
On the town
Dear Diary:
A talking cat
watches a baby pigeon
on a stone terrace
where a boy rides a unicycle
before his real lesson.
A heart-sword balloon
and then a heart-sword balloon fight …
The crosstown bus arrives.
A teenager asks his mom, is something happening,
there’s so much traffic.
“It’s the Met Gala,” I say,
in that helpful New York way.
This was my day.
— Olivia Loving
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.