Hermena Moffatt Cox is a hairdresser who has run her own salon on the corner of Parkside Avenue and Flatbush Avenue for the last 18 years. It’s a few blocks from the apartment where she raised her four children. Cox, 53, moved to Flatbush from Jamaica 29 years ago, a year before the birth of her only son, Deshawn Reid. He grew up to be a doting momma’s boy, who was always offering to run errands for her and affectionately referred to Cox as his “home girl.”
Cox was at the salon on August 14th, when she got a call from a neighbor that Reid had been injured.
“I rushed over here immediately and when I came I saw a lot of blood,” she recalled, standing tearful, on the sidewalk outside the family’s apartment. It’s now decorated with dozens of blue and white candles, flowers and photos of Reid. She asked officers at the scene, “‘Is my son OK?’”
He wasn’t. It was 4 p.m. and 28-year-old Deshawn Reid had been shot once in the stomach. He later died at Kings County Hospital. “No one would expect for my son to lay...here in front of the building where he grew up his whole life,” she said.
Reid was the first of three men fatally shot in five days along a three-block stretch of Ocean Avenue just south of Prospect Park. Another bystander was shot and is likely paralyzed.
It’s part of a citywide spike in shootings that’s rattled neighbors and uprooted families. Nearly twice as many have taken place this year compared to the same time period last year. The violence has been concentrated in communities of color across the city.
Listen to Gwynne Hogan's report on WNYC:
Experts and local leaders point to a confluence of factors: the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression—even higher in communities of color—and a global pandemic that hit some of those same neighborhoods the hardest.
Police records show that while the number of people shot is up 95 percent this year compared to the same period last year, the number of arrests for gun crimes is down 7.2 percent, and arrests overall are down 39.2 percent.
Mayor Bill de Blasio and NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea have blamed the spike in shootings on the partially shut down court system, though data doesn’t support that assertion.
Mayor De Blasio has repeatedly denied there’s an NYPD work slowdown.
While the city set aside an additional $10 million in funds for violence interrupter groups that work with young people to de-escalate arguments before they turn violent, none of those groups operate in this section of Flatbush, according to Pastor Gilford Monrose, a clergy leader in Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams’s office, who works closely with cure violence groups that operate in parts of East Flatbush, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Brownsville, and East New York.
Cox said she felt she’s seen less police in the area, coinciding with calls from protesters to defund the police, though she added she’s now working closely with NYPD detectives to find her son’s killer.
“These men that are going around killing people, feel that they can walk freely with their gun. Not saying that it wasn't happening before, but it’s happening more now,” she said. “I think they need to bring back that full funding of police officers, I really do.”
A memorial for 47-year-old Paul Pinkney, who friends knew as P-Funk or just Funk. Pinkney was shot and killed on August 16th.
After weeks of massive protests in the streets following the death of George Floyd, the Mayor and the City Council pledged to cut the NYPD’s budget by $1 billion and reallocate money to underserved communities. But a Citizens Budget Commission report found the department only lost about $345 million, about a 6.6 percent decrease. Commissioner Shea said more police officers would work weekends, in an effort to increase police presence in neighborhoods with the most gun violence. The NYPD didn’t return a request for further comment.
Some Flatbush residents say they haven’t seen many officers on this block lately.
“Bring the police. Why y’all not out here? Nobody’s out here. That’s crazy. They gave up,” said 49-year-old Daquan Sincear, who was sitting on a recent afternoon with a group of friends beside a community garden. He gestured down the street, to where a police car was stationed on the corner where one of the men, 18-year-old Malcolm Amede, was shot and killed on August 19th.
“They on their cell phones. They’re on fucking Facebook, shit like that, they right there on Facebook and n-----s getting shot right in front of them,” he said of the NYPD. “It’s not real. This can’t be my life.”
Sincear’s comments echoed the findings of a report on New York City gun violence released by the Center for Court Innovation earlier this month. According to the report, New Yorkers living in neighborhoods where gun violence is routine experience “police harassment for small infractions but [a] lack of responsiveness for serious crime.”
One of Sincear’s best friends, 47-year-old Paul Pinkney, was also killed on the block on August 16th, shot twice in the head. For Sincear it was an unimaginable loss; his wife had just died of cancer a day earlier. Pinkney had come to deliver a candle, a sympathy card, and offer his condolences. He was killed hours later beside Prospect Park.
“Why my boy gone, man? Damn...I can’t believe this boy is gone,” he said. “This is not human. What’s happening right now is not human…All these killings on one strip of one block.”
Another man, Vernon Nesfield, 72, who’d lived in the neighborhood for more than three decades, said he thought nearly three months of protests against police had soured their attitudes towards residents.
“They’re trying to defund the police. You can’t do that, you know. So now the police [have not] been giving 100 percent anymore,” he said. “They’re human beings...punish them or penalize them for any reason, they're going [with] retaliation, pure and simple.”
Though Nesfield said he agreed with some of the goals of protesters, like putting more funds towards education, he worried about the impact of painting the whole police department in one light.
“You cannot punish a whole force for a few bad apples,” he said.
A memorial for 18-year-old Malcolm Amede, who was shot and killed on August 19th.
Pastor Gilford Monrose, the clergy leader, said no matter what the politics of the moment are, NYPD officers are city workers paid by taxpayers for a reason.
“Even if the police department feels at this point, the tide against them, they still have to do their job in a professional way...They need to take care of the streets,” he said, adding that he doesn’t want to see more police, but better policing.
“Focus on the people bringing in the guns, who are trafficking the guns,” he said. “We need that.”
Three murders have been recorded in the 70th Precinct, which includes parts of Flatbush, Midwood and Ditmas Park, compared to 46 in 1993. Through August 16th there were 259 murders citywide, a 30 percent increase from last year, but still dramatically less than 1990 when 2,262 people were murdered across the five boroughs.
Other Flatbush residents said they would welcome more police, and now dreaded the short walk to Prospect Park with young kids for fear of catching a stray bullet. Not everyone agreed.
One man, who declined to give his name or age, describing himself as “just young and black,” was sitting outside the apartment building where 18-year-old Malcom Amede's family lives, a few blocks from the place where he was killed, the third man to die in gunfire on August 19th at 3:37 p.m.
He said he worried more police would mean more violent encounters with community members.
“What you sending more police to do? Police and people on the streets don’t have rapport like that,” he said. “Sending more police is more things gonna happen.”
