City officials tasked with making the city safer have turned to high schoolers to better understand what is driving violence. What students have told them is alarming, but not surprising: Many young people from low-income neighborhoods know people who carry guns or who have experienced gun violence.

The conversations with students were part of a listening tour by Deputy Mayor for Community Safety Renita Francois and other officials from the newly created Office of Community Safety. That office is tasked with creating public safety through methods that don’t involve policing.

“More than half of the young people I spoke to directly, knew someone who carried a gun or who had been harmed by a gun,” she said after one of the sessions at Manhattan Early College Academy for Marketing & Media Arts, a high school in Lower Manhattan.

The tour comes as the number of young people charged in fatal shootings has increased, even as shootings and killings have declined in the city overall. Law enforcement officials have repeatedly blamed state criminal justice reforms, such as the Raise the Age law, for that uptick and called for the law to be amended.

But Zohran Mamdani’s administration is trying to find another remedy, including by developing policies and strategy for public safety after listening to young people’s concerns. During the conversations, Francois said students repeatedly raised things like access to jobs and mental health support to increase community safety. Listening to young people about those alternatives to law enforcement is an important approach, one policing and crime expert told Gothamist.

“If we think that kids themselves have a role in responding to violence and violence reduction …  it would be important to hear them talk about what makes it easier for them to fulfill that role and what makes it more challenging,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a policing scholar and law professor at Columbia University.

Teen violence

The Raise the Age law, signed by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, ended the state’s practice of charging 16- and 17-year-olds as adults if they were arrested for crimes. Prior to the law, New York was just one of two states in the nation that did so, leading to teens being imprisoned in jails like the notoriously violent Rikers Island jails complex.

Top law enforcement officials in the city, including the Bronx district attorney and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, have pointed to the Raise the Age law for the increase in teen gun cases.

A study released last year by the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice found the number of juveniles arrested for felonies slightly dropped in 2024 compared to 2018, prior to the law taking effect.

The notable exception, the report notes, was gun arrests for those under 18, which spiked 136% between 2018 and 2024.

“The increase in youth-specific gun incidents suggests a rising exposure to firearms for this group,” according to the report.

Mamdani has expressed support for the Raise the Age law, but has criticized how it's been implemented. In September, Mamdani specifically took issue with how funds have been allocated through the law, saying they should have been spent on investments in re-entry programs and alternatives to incarceration but were not properly appropriated.

Community approach

Two high schoolers who spoke with the deputy mayor at the event at MECA, the lower Manhattan high school, told Gothamist that they wanted more support from the city to stop violence before it breaks out.

Savannah Almonte, 16, of Harlem, said she told Francois about the violence she sees in her neighborhood. “I experienced gun violence. Someone that I knew got shot.”

Almonte said she hopes the city will work with young people to better control their emotions to prevent shootings.

Josea Dunn, a 16-year-old student from Coney Island, said his primary concern was untreated mental illness among residents in his neighborhood.

“I think mental health is a bigger role in violence than people realize,” Dunn said.

Francois said students she spoke to on the listening tour also expressed worry about finding jobs. Many said their parents are unable to support them.

“They talked about just growing up in chaos, some of them, basically,” she said.

Francois said the police department did not come up when teens spoke about how they could improve safety in their communities.

“I think that’s telling,” she said. “They were more focused on what they actually need, the material conditions of their lives that make them feel unsafe, and what we could provide as a city to address that. Never once did that include the police.”

Francois spoke to Gothamist at an event organized by her office for students at Gotham Park, across the street from MECA, which sits next to the Brooklyn Bridge and in the shadow of NYPD headquarters, known as 1 Police Plaza.

She noted the proximity to the building was an interesting juxtaposition.

“We can have 1PP in the background where it belongs, as the institution that's there to keep us safe in the event that something happens or goes wrong,” she said.

There are opportunities for collaboration with the department she said, noting police officers were in the park as students celebrated the end to the school year.

But, she added, the primary thought for community safety for young people in the city should be about getting resources they request, like mental health services and access to employment.

“This is what community and community safety looks like,” she said.

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the Office of Community Safety sponsored the event at Gotham Park.