Armed with Reason: The Podcast - Episode 22
Reporting on inner city gun violence solutions, with NYC-based journalist Josiah Bates
This week, Devin and Caitlin from GVPedia are joined by Josiah Bates, a New York City-based journalist (Time, The Grio) who has a brand new book out, In These Streets: Reporting from the Front Lines of Inner-City Gun Violence (Johns Hopkins University Press). In it, Bates discusses the complicated problem of gun violence in our cities that is wrought with stereotypical conclusions and frustrating inertia — while offering a way out of the morass.
“The book is really told from the perspective of community members, community leaders, people on the ground doing the work.”
You can listen to the podcast via our channel on Spotify as well as watch on YouTube, or read the transcription below.
We hope you’ll tune in and let us know not only what you think, but what you’d like to hear more about in the future. And if you are interested in recommending a guest, or even being one yourself, please let us know!
Given the abundance of gun violence in our country, it is critical to have the ability to discuss and advocate for a safer community. This podcast is one more way for the movement to do just that.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION:
Caitlin: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us here today on the Armed With Reason podcast, brought to you by GVPedia. I recently read about a new book that is hitting the bookshelves, and it's about gun violence, and the title is, In These Streets: Reporting from the Frontlines of Inner-City Gun Violence.
And a few months ago here on the podcast, we had Oronde McClain on as a guest. And he is a survivor who works with journalists on the integrity of their reporting about gun violence. So it seemed like this guest who authored this book is the perfect sequel to a Oronde's story.
So for today, I'm excited to introduce Josiah Bates. He is a New York City-based journalist. He covers criminal justice issues like policing, gun violence, and crime legislation. And he most recently worked as an enterprise reporter for The Grio. And before that, he spent three years at Time magazine as a reporter and a staff writer. And his book, In the Streets, will be coming out on May 28th. So, Josiah, first, thank you so much for joining us here today. We really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. And just to get us started, do you mind telling us a little bit about your book, and what you hope readers might take away from it?
Josiah: Yeah. And first, you know, thank you so much for for having me. So the book is really an extension of my coverage of criminal justice issues as a journalist. When I was at Time magazine, it was during, you know, 2020, when gun violence really surged, and you know it was bubbling a little bit before the summer. But obviously, you know, after George Floyd was killed, it really it really increased. And I was just doing a lot of coverage of it on different cities, you know, talking with different people and stuff. And just a lot of the takeaways, a lot of things I was hearing it was pretty similar in different cities, and people, you know, saying like, you know, why don't we have a handle on this now? You know, we know the solutions to this problem. You know, all of that stuff. And I just thought it would be it could be interesting to kind of put this all together in a book, you know, look at this surge that happened, but also kind of lay out the solutions that people are calling for.
And, you know, the book is really told from the perspective of community members, community leaders, people on the ground doing the work. So that's a little bit about the book. And, you know, the big takeaway I want — I mean, there's a lot of takeaways — but the main one I would say is, gun violence is driven — especially, you know, inner city gun violence, community gun violence, whatever you want to call it — it's driven by a lot of factors. So it's going to take a lot of factors to address it. And, you know, I think there's different people or there's different groups that, you know, want to argue it's this one thing we need to do; it's that it's that one thing we need to do. In reality is we need to do a lot of different things to address it. And we need to do them all at the same time if we want to have a sustained impact on gun violence. So that that's the big takeaway, I would say, I want people to walk away from the book with.
Josiah Bates
Devin: Yeah. So one of the main people you follow in the book, from what I've read, is a violence prevention worker by the name of Roy Alfonso from Brooklyn. And you detail his journey from his youth perpetrating gun violence to now trying to prevent it. Can you tell us a little bit more about Roy and what his story basically reveals about the state of gun violence, particularly from 2020 to now?
Josiah: Yeah. So Roy — the name, it's a pseudonym for a real person. But, you know, Roy is, he's a native New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn. Grew up in the '80s when, you know, the crack epidemic was, you know, had a stranglehold on on communities like that. And, you know, like a lot of other, you know, young men, around his age, you know, he he kind of got drawn to the streets. He was known as what you would call a stickup kid. You know, it's getting into different criminal activities. So, you know, robberies, getting into shootouts, and things like that. He ended up going to prison at a really young age. He was about 16 years old, and he was in prison for for over 20 years.
And while he was locked up, he really rehabilitated himself and kind of opened his mind to like what his community was like. Like what his role in what was going on, and how he could change it if he ever got the opportunity to get out. And when he was released, you know, he told himself, you know, he wanted to he wanted to help, you know, fight the very thing that he was involved in. So, you know, he joined a local violence prevention and intervention organization. He was a violence interrupter for a while now. He's more of like a supervisor, overseeing different violence interrupters and just running things with the group. And I think he's, you know, an example of someone who is, you know, part of the problem, and now wants to be part of the solution.
And part of the reason I wanted to center the book around someone like him was just because I feel like that's the type of person that we don't hear enough from around this issue. You know, we hear a lot from academics. We hear a lot from from politicians. We hear a lot from law enforcement. But we don't hear enough from the the people like him. And, you know his perspective on gun violence is, you know, similar to how I'm sure most of us will feel about it, like it's a horrible thing that's going on in the community and it needs to stop — but we have a lot of work to do if we want it to stop. And, you know, I did in the book, you know, I go through his life and his role in a lot of different things that were going on in 2020 and beyond. But, I just think he's someone that we need to hear more from if we really want to want to address this problem. And I, you know, I just thought he was like the perfect person for that.
Devin: Yeah. And so often in the like broader-level gun debate, it's often framed as like, Oh that's just gun or gang violence and stuff like that. And treating like people who would be in gangs or people they call gang members but might be involved in other activities, and they just treat them as separate from everybody else and like a problem where you just lock them up and throw away the key, and that's going to fix things. And the impression I got from what I read on your Substack about Roy is that his narrative really challenges those kind of assumptions.
And in a way shows that a lot of these kids who get caught up in that stuff, like, they're obtaining guns because they think it will make them safer as well. And then through circumstances, like, it doesn't necessarily negate the personal responsibility aspect of it, but there's all sorts of crushing factors around that drive somebody to do the sort of activities that Roy did, and then later on realized that this is part of a major problem that needs a comprehensive solution to solve.
Josiah: Yeah. I mean, someone like Roy, the way he grew up when he, you know, when he was really young, he grew up in a house, you know, had his mother there, grandmother, aunts. Like it was a real kind of community. And he was living in a part, you know, Bed-Stuy that was kind of siloed off from a lot of the craziness that was going on. But then there was a fire at his house, and his house burned down, and then he ends up moving. He moves to a shelter, and then he moves to another house, and then he ends up in the projects. And what did he see in the projects? Right? He saw, you know, dudes on the corner. And, you know, he saw people doing drugs. It was just a different environment. And yeah, a lot of people, you know, that grow up in that don't end up turning to the streets, but there are some people that do. And when you grow up in that type of environment, you're more susceptible to going down that path. And so yeah, you're right. Like, it's just a lot of nuance that goes into it. It's not as simple as some people want to make it where it's just like, Well just don't pick up a gun. There's just a lot of nuance that that goes into it.
Devin: Yeah. So one of your chapters focuses on, like specifically focuses on the spike of gun violence in 2020 and its origins. And often in left-leaning circles, I hear the entire phenomenon blamed on the pandemic. Like, the reason for the 2020 spike was due to Covid. But that doesn't seem quite accurate, because nearly every country in the world faced the pandemic to some degree. But the spike in gun violence was relatively unique to the U.S. And also particularly when you look at Gun Violence Archive data — where you can get down to like exact days and specifically with mass shootings — you can pinpoint the day George Floyd was murdered, because the day after and continuing for weeks and months, there is a massive spike in mass shootings. And that keeps going up right after the death.
But on the opposite side, you see many on the right blame the spike in gun violence purely on the protests and police defunding. But that's not really accurate either, because, as you point out, many police departments didn't really lose all that much of any funding. And although police did pull back in places due to societal pressures, further, before the summer began, you had a historic surge in gun purchases due to Covid. And a bunch of community violence interruption programs that weren't really able to function given the lockdown and just the drying up of funding.
So from my perspective, it's a combination of all these factors, from the societal stresses from the pandemic, to police pulling back, combined with a surge of new guns — and all of that combined proved catastrophic. What did you find in your book that might disagree or agree with this sort of hypothesis?
Josiah: So basically everything you're describing is exactly what I found in my book. You know, and it's like I said at the beginning, like, there isn't one factor that that drives gun violence. So, you know, we can break it down a little bit more. So yes, Covid wasn't the main factor, right? It wasn't just, Covid happened and then gun violence went up. That's not true. But it was a factor. And I can remember, you know, this is before anything having to do with the book, before George Floyd, like talking mid-to-late April 2020, like early May 2020 when I was, you know covering this topic, you know, talking with people in different cities. I remember talking with some community workers in Chicago, and they're all saying like, we can't go do our work now because of these lockdowns. Like, we're not able to to talk with people out on the streets. And, you know, police departments in a lot of major cities, a lot of their mandates where, you know, if you don't absolutely have to interact with someone, don't. Like, stay away from people and things like that.
So Covid did put a halt to a lot of things that were going on on the ground. But it wasn't the main factor. The same with the protesting and, you know, the defund the police movement. And I hope people at this point realize this — no police department was defunded in a meaningful way. I think, you know, the NYPD took, I think, a billion from their their $6 billion budget. But then if you look at the budget now, it's like more than it was then. I think the LAPD took some funds from their department, but I'm talking like no department was stripped of their funding.
Now, police departments, if you talk with different law enforcement leaders, and you talk with people in communities like, yes, the police did take a step back. As I'm sure you guys might be aware of this kind of term in criminal justice circles, the Ferguson Effect, where high profile, controversial police killing happened, police pull back, and violent crime goes up. You know, some people push back on the the theory. But what appears to have happened in 2020 is because of George Floyd, and because that was such a big moment, that that effect took place everywhere almost. So no, that wasn't the main factor either. But it was a factor. And it's just a combination of things that that drove this.
And, you know, you called it catastrophic. I think that's a perfect way to describe it. I refer to it in the book as just like this perfect storm of things that happened in 2020. Even if you look at, you know, you mentioned the the amount of guns that were purchased during Covid. If you look at any ATF tracing data that came out, it says that guns were being bought. More guns were being bought in 2020 and more guns were being found. More guns were making their way into the illegal market quicker than they usually had. And that was as a result of more people, you know, buying more guns. So again, it was just a combination of things that that led to this. And that's why it's going to take a combination of things to address it.
Caitlin: One of the paragraphs from your book reads, "One of the more ignorant statements that those on the outside make about gun violence is that folks who live in the hood don't care about it, that they only care about gun violence when the trigger man is a police officer. That's far from the truth. Most people who live in these neighborhoods care deeply about the problem." First of all, I apologize for any sort of situation people have been in where they thought it was appropriate to make such a comment, because it is totally ignorant. You address that there. And second, I read this and I thought about the deeper effects, like the ripple effect. And when statements like these are made or when this is the attitude of individuals who are looking from the outside in, what sort of impact does that have on the community?
Josiah: I mean, it can have a devastating impact. I think, just to kind of flesh that point out more, it's a lot of these academics and these experts that that make that point, whether they make it, you know, in public or, you know, in writing that they do on social media. And I'm not, you know, I have nothing against academics and experts. If you read the book, I interviewed quite a few of them, and I have a lot of respect for the work that they do. But some of them, you know, to me, in my opinion, they move in in kind of bad faith where it's not really about the issue, it's just about pushing their political ideals. But these are people that, you know, they testify in DC or they have like influence. And when you when you say things like that, when you try to make that argument, you're negatively impacting the response that's going to happen from decision makers in these communities. And the impact that that has, I mean, you know, if you're hearing all the time that your neighborhood doesn't care about this or your neighborhood is okay with this, then you're going to think, Oh, then this is okay, it's fine for this to be happening.
But what I will say is, I don't think, you know, the argument I make in the book and what I've just seen in my reporting is that there's no one that cares more about this than the people that live in these communities. And you look at when a shooting happens or when something happens, who are the people that are putting together the rallies? Who are the people that are, you know, providing resources for the families impacted? Who are the people that are putting together the funerals? Who are the people that are demanding action from lawmakers? It's all people that live in the community. It's not academics that would never in their lives set foot in the community. They'll look at data, they'll look at numbers, but they'll never go to the communities and actually talk with people. So it can have a negative impact. But I don't think, people, you know, the stakeholders in the neighborhoods let that influence how they operate. I think they know, like, we have to care about this. We have to be the ones to do something about it. And that's the action that you see.
So it's unfortunate, and it was one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book to just kind of push back against that narrative. But you know, I think most people in the community know, like, that type of stuff, we can ignore that, and let's focus on what's happening in our in our neighborhoods.
Caitlin: Yeah, I think you can look at it in two different ways. The first being, Oh they don't they don't care, right? They just accept it for how it is — which is nuts to me. But the second — and something that we see all the time, not only in gun violence, but in lots of other social justice issues -- is they care about it and they're screaming from the rooftops, and either nobody's listening, or they're not given the platform to have access for people to listen. So that is just terribly shortsighted.
And you're right, these are subject matter experts who take the stand, and they testify, and they give speeches, and they have the podium, and they wear fancy suits. And so it makes them more credible and more believable. And it's just unfortunate because that sort of assumption is what limits resources to communities that that need it the most. So that's my soapbox.
Devin: You know, just to kind of hop on that and expand. Like in a way it's almost the opposite of like, oh, the community only cares if it's police that pulls trigger. It's like when you look at all these instances, it's the national media that only cares when it's a police officer who pulls the trigger. Or in the case of like, gun violence, like it's only the high profile mass shootings. So it's not just like mass shootings. It has to be high profile enough now for like the media to care. And then you have people like, Why do like gun violence prevention advocates only care about the mass shootings. Or why do community justice advocates only care when it's the police? And it's like, well, no, we've been talking about these issues. We have a whole list of things that have happened that need to be reformed that we're consistently talking about. It's just that a lot of the more high profile media and experts... they only talk about when these situations happen, and it's like, Oh, we're only caring with this. And then kind of projecting that on to the communities that are like, where have you been for the past two decades when we've been talking about these issues?!
And I would also imagine on top of that that it gets exhausting after a while, particularly in communities where you have shootings in the neighborhood, like every week or every day. Where it's this constant drumbeat of trauma that like, if you've been ignored for 10, 20 years, I would imagine that just creates a massive psychological toll where it's like, Well, I can't control any of this. I can only control, like, my own life and kind of a disengagement from the important work. But an understandable disengagement. So, kind of curious about your thoughts on our two soapboxes there?
Josiah: I think the point you made about the media is a really good one. And that's something I've dealt with as someone who works in the media, you know, covering gun violence, especially on a national scale. it's difficult. You know, it's hard to get newsrooms to to care about it. You're right. It takes, you know, a high profile or, you know, a high fatality mass shooting. Because, you know, when you think about... you know, the high profile mass shootings, obviously those need to be addressed. Those are important as well. Like nobody's going to say we shouldn't care about those. But mass shootings happen all the time in the hood, in poor neighborhoods. It's just they usually don't have the same body count as, you know, a Uvalde or, you know, the high school in Florida, or whichever. And they're those happen in places that it's supposed to be safe, right? Like when you read about 20 people shot over the weekend in Chicago and you go to you read the article and you see specifically where it happened, it's like, Oh, yeah, it's the South Side of Chicago, it's like it's near old black like, yeah, that's typical. But if you read about a mass shooting that happens at a school where, like, gun violence doesn't happen at all, it's a different reaction.
And that's, you know, the media, you can put some of that on the media. I do think there's just this level of complacency where, and you can see some of that complacency in the community as well as you just said. Like people are like, There's nothing I can do about this. I just got to worry about myself and protect myself. So it's just this cycle that we've had, and, you know, the way to address it is we have to get everyone involved. That's why it's not just the community, right? We need lawmakers to do something. We need the police to do to do something. We need politicians and the federal government to do something, right? The community on its own can't solve it. People can take it. You can have as much accountability, self responsibility as you want. If there're guns everywhere in your neighborhood, somebody is going to use them. So it just takes a lot of different things, a lot of different aspects to deal with the problem.
Devin: Yeah. And that kind of brings up one of the misconceptions from a lot of people on all sides of this discussion where, like, you'll have people who focus only on the high level gun laws such as like permit to purchase —and like, at GVPedia were massive proponents of permit to purchase. If there's any one gun law that's going to have the largest impact on gun violence overall, it's probably permit to purchase. But that's not sufficient. And you have advocates who point to community violence interruption programs that directly do outreach to at-risk people. And like those are critical to reducing gun violence when implemented properly. But they're not sufficient because with those, like if you still have a massive flood of guns into a community, people are going to pick them up. And yet, if you don't have the community violence interruption but just the top level law, you're still going to have a continuation of destructive patterns of behavior. So it requires all of that and also requires economic solutions, education solutions.
And really, as you've been talking about, and we at GVPedia also advocate for, the comprehensive approach to reducing gun violence. And if pieces of that tapestry aren't in place, the problem's going to still continue. And it has to be all of it now, not just segments of it, we feel. And so one of the things we do at GVPedia in addition to this is looking at the myths and tropes produced by the gun lobby and its allies. And one of those is that gun homicides are overwhelmingly gang related and resulting from fights over drugs. And they conveniently don't provide a definition for gangs. So they typically look at any shooting that appears in an inner city, and say like, Oh, that's clearly gang. And while the nationwide stats indicate that this is false at a national level — because approximately 10 to 20% of gun homicides are gang related, according to the best data we have.
Even in communities where gang violence is more heavily concentrated, isn't the story substantially more complicated than rival gangs engage in turf battles over drugs? Aren't many of the people labeled as gang members often people who buy guns to protect themselves, and then get caught up in personal vendettas and arguments that tend to spiral out of control?
Josiah: Yeah. So it's it's definitely more complicated than just gang rivalries. You know, that's the perception. You know, it's just gangs running around these neighborhoods just getting into shootouts — and that's just not true that it can honestly be, you know, everyday conflicts that turn violent and someone, you know, pulls out a gun because they have one on them. I didn't go into too much detail with this story, but in the book I do mention it.
So there was someone, through a source or someone that I interviewed for the book, you know, he told me a separate story about someone that he knows that had been shot previously, just in, like, a failed robbery attempt. And he started carrying a gun with him just out of paranoia. And there was one time where he was driving, he went to the gas station, and he felt like this this car was following him. He goes into the gas station store, and the two guys get out of the car and follow him into the store. And he thinks, you know, these are the guys that that tried to rob him before. So he pulls out his gun and start shooting at them. They get away. But, it can be things like that. It can be an argument, you know, it could just be an argument that's going on outside and somebody has a gun and they just pull it out. So gang violence is a part of it. But a lot of times it is just those everyday conflicts that get violent because people have guns.
And that goes back to the easy access of guns. And a lot of times, you know, in these kind of neighborhoods these guns aren't legal. You know, these people aren't buying them, you know, going into a gun store and buying them. They're getting them on the street. So, that's why, you know, addressing the illegal flow of guns into these communities is also important. But, yeah, just the idea that it's just gang violence and it's just a whole bunch of warring gangs in all these neighborhoods, that's that's not accurate. And it's unfortunate because it feels like a lot of gun violence, a lot of the discussion around gun violence is just like knocking down some of these myths and tropes. It's like we can't even get to the solutions because you have to argue. It's like, well, that's not true. That's not true. That's not true. And by the time you can even get to the solutions, you just spent the whole debate discussing what's a myth and what's not. So that's just another unfortunate part of this issue.
Caitlin: Yeah, the gang conversation for me in an empathetic way always leads to, well, gangs are made up of individual humans, right? Like someone's brother, someone's son, someone's husband.... Like why do we not care how they ended up in a situation that made them feel like joining a gang was the the best opportunity they had to survive, right? So obviously that's a whole other book that could be that could be written. But, it is sad to me how how easily people just brush that off. We actually see that search — it's interesting if care anything about analytics when it comes to our website — that's consistently the most popular search we see is related to gun violence in gangs. So it means that people are going on on the internet, on Google and asking questions, and it's bringing us to our page. But there's a reason they're they're thinking that, right? There's a bias that's coming out in order for them to formulate that question in their mind, type it on the computer, and for them to end up on our page.
Devin: And spikes right after mass shootings as well. So it's off of people encountering like, Yeah, but what about gangs in response to the shooting? It's just used as a political football.
Josiah: Yeah. That's the bad faith kind of argument, right? Whether it's a mass shooting or whether it's a police shooting, you know, people say, Well what about black on black violence, or what about gang violence? It's like, well, you've never brought that up before. You've never actually cared about that. But there are plenty of ways that people are working to address that. You're just not paying attention to it because you don't actually care. You're just using it as a political tool to make a political argument. So yeah.
Caitlin: Yeah, absolutely. So can you tell us where our listeners can find your book?
Josiah: Yeah, you can find it, it's available on Amazon. Bookshop. Barnes and Noble. It'll be out, May 28th. So I don't know when this will be out...
Caitlin: This, in theory, will be out the day after your book launch. Okay, so good timing.
Josiah: So it's on it's on Amazon. Bookshop, Barnes and Noble. You can go, I have a website — josiahbates.com — where you can you can purchase it there. But yeah, really, you know, really looking forward to the reaction, the feedback. And you know, I hope people, when they read it, you know, it's not an easy read. It's a lot of difficult kind of stories and topics. But I hope people walk away from it knowing that there are ways to address this. There are things that can be done immediately to address this. And it's something that, you know, work is already being done. And if if people are committed to work, the work should continue.
Caitlin: Absolutely.
Devin: I'll just provide a quick shout out to your Substack — The Margins with Josiah Bates — which is @josiahbates.substack.com. Armed with Reason has recommended the Substack as well, so you can find it through our Substack as well. And the book is In These Streets: Reporting from the Frontlines of Inner-City Gun Violence, by Josiah Bates. Josiah, thank you so much for being here.
Josiah: Thank you, guys. I really appreciate it.
Caitlin: Any final thoughts you want to leave our listeners with Josiah?
Josiah: I would say, kind of reiterating what I said earlier, you know, that that there are multiple solutions to this, that all need to be applied. And instead of focusing on finger pointing and arguing, you know, the focus should be on those solutions.
Caitlin: Absolutely. And we appreciate you not only being here today, but putting in the work to write such an important book to tell the stories of people whose stories probably would not be heard another way; and to really remind us that these communities are made up of individuals that we absolutely have to care about. And sometimes that means we need to put money behind it and resources behind it. And that's just how it is. And the the messages in your book will amplify the work, how much work needs to be done, but also the fact that there is progress being made by people every single day who are out there trying to make a difference and trying to save lives. So thank you so much for bringing attention to that.
Josiah: Thank you.