At what was supposed to be a memorial for a teenage girl who died from stab wounds last year, an argument between several mourners turned into a gunfight. Bullets flew into a crowd of children, bystanders, and basketball players as the triggers were squeezed repeatedly. Some people ran for their lives; others screamed. One fell.
A stray bullet struck the skull of 4-year-old Lloyd Morgan Jr. In an instant, he was gone — another casualty of gun violence in New York City. “I’ve always heard about the killings in the streets,” said Shianne Norman at a candlelight vigil held for her son just a few days before his funeral. “This is horrific. This cannot keep happening. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”
Among the many groups and individuals that mobilized to speak out against violence in the aftermath, one was particularly notable for its political, financial and ideological support of gun control: the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, a citywide organization commonly known by the acronym COBA.
A recent radio commercial, which emulates the voice of a boy who has been killed in a shooting, featured Norman Seabrook, the association’s president. After young “Mark” ends his monologue, Seabrook pleads to New York residents to stand up against gun violence, appealing to their sense of responsibility by saying, “It’s time to do the right thing.”
As the second-largest law enforcement union in the state, representing approximately 15,000 correction officers in New York City, COBA has been also vocal in its endorsements of and donations to candidates in the city’s political sphere, where gun control has become one of the most highly debated topics in recent years.
“Anybody that wants to receive an endorsement from the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association has got to have a few things on the agenda,” said Seabrook. “One of these things that must be on the agenda, and not just rhetoric, is a solid plan to combat gun violence. The bottom line to it is all of those who want to lead must step up and show the public, the people, who they are and be transparent about how they feel about gun violence.”
COBA was the first union in the city that formally endorsed Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2001, according to Michael Skelly, a spokesman for the association, and it has given just shy of $40,000 to political candidates in various communities in New York for the upcoming election cycle. Many of these candidates — such as Jumaane Williams, a Democratic incumbent City Council member from New York’s 45th District, and Democratic State Sen. Eric Adams — are proponents of anti-gun violence initiatives.
Both of these candidates’ campaigns received the largest legal contribution from COBA, $2,750 in Williams’ case and $3,850 in Adams’. In contrast, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest law enforcement union in New York, has given $9,050 to candidates this election cycle.
Williams, who received one of his three maximum contributions from COBA, recently tweeted his belief that gun control is a critical issue, saying, “We must recommit to combating the gun violence epidemic.”
“We will not reduce our vigilance in working to save lives here in this city and beyond,” read a statement by Williams. He is a co-chair of the Task Force to Combat Gun Violence along with Fernando Cabrera, City Council member for New York’s 14th District in the Bronx, and Christine Quinn, speaker of the New York City Council and the presumptive front-runner in the 2013 mayoral race.
In the wake of this statement, the Task Force to Combat Gun Violence recently announced a program called the Anti-Gun Violence Initiative, which will be implemented by the task force in 2013. This initiative, a $4.8 million program that will be funded by the City Council, will enact rapid response and violence prevention programs in what the committee’s members consider the five most threatened precincts in the city.
Williams, who is outspoken in his belief that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program is ineffective and that other solutions like this program are better designed to curb gun violence, referred to the initiative as a “breakthrough first step in our fight to save our youth from the gun epidemic that is claiming their lives.”
COBA also supports Adams, who is running for Brooklyn borough president in 2013 and currently serves as senator of the 20th District in Brooklyn. Adams, who would be the first black to be elected Brooklyn borough president, served as a New York City police officer for 22 years until he was elected to office in 2006.
On Adams’ website, he hosts a video, which has been viewed more than 5,000 times, that instructs parents on how to search their homes for contraband. Adams also recently asked Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg to allocate $50 million in emergency funds to community centers in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant, where the first gun-related homicide of 2012 took place. Bloomberg, who stated his belief that tough law enforcement policies are more effective than community-run programs regarding gun control, rejected the proposal, saying that this $50 million would “probably never reach” the people who tote illegal guns in New York.
Though New York has some of the strictest laws regarding gun ownership and possession, the city’s police department collects thousands of illegal guns every year. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reported that 8,793 guns were collected in New York in 2011, but only 1,595 of them in a New York-based purchase. This means that almost 7,200 guns were brought into New York last year from outside the state, a trend that allows individuals who cannot meet the requirements to own a gun in New York to buy one elsewhere and smuggle it across the border. Bloomberg attributes this trend to the adoption of lenient gun laws in other states.
In the wake of several high-profile shootings — the murder of 12 moviegoers at a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora, Colo.; the killing of six people in a Sikh temple near Milwaukee, Wisc.; and the death of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black teenager who was fatally shot by a member of a neighborhood-watch program in Florida — gun violence could play a role in the national election. But some political leaders, like Bloomberg, contend that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have not adequately addressed the issue of gun control on a national level.
“The people who want to run this country need to tell us their plans to stop the bloodshed,” Bloomberg said in a statement.
COBA’s Seabrook applauded Bloomberg for his attempts to call upon Obama and Romney for answers about their stance on gun control.
“You have to give credit where credit is due,” said Seabrook, whose association was the first union outside of Illinois to endorse Obama in his presidential campaign, according to Skelly. “The mayor of the city of New York is trying, you know. He is pushing the envelope to tell me what the President, or the candidate for President, of the United States is going to do about gun violence. What are they going to do about guns? Neither of them seem to have an answer to this. Neither one of them seem to be saying anything.”
In their own ways, the majority of law enforcement officers and members of government work to protect their constituents from danger. “I will not sit by,” Seabrook said, “and watch another member of New York’s Boldest or any other New Yorker become yet another fatal statistic.”
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