NEW YORK – Saying if we could defeat COVID-19 we can defeat gun violence, Governor Cuomo, Tuesday, declared war on the scourge, which is particularly devastating to black and brown communities, he said.
The governor signed legislation declaring a disaster emergency on gun violence and announced a multi-pronged approach to put a lid on it.
“If you can beat OVID, you can beat gun violence, you can beat poverty, you can beat drug abuse; you can beat whatever you want to beat.
We just have to want to do it,” he told an audience of community leaders at John Jay College in New York City.
The plan ranges from providing alternatives for young people to avoid street crime, like jobs and recreational activities; mapping and targeting high-crime areas; getting illegal guns off the streets; intervening with victims right at hospitals with interveners like with the SNUG program (SNUG spells GUNS backwards); community engagement; and building police-community relations.
The governor committed $138 million in state funds to the efforts.
In recent months, gun violence has been on the rise in this area in Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Kingston, Monticello, New Rochelle and Yonkers among other locations.
Many communities are already doing what the governor said. Poughkeepsie and Newburgh both have the SNUG program and local police departments to crime mapping to target crime-riddled areas.
