Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday praised the NYPD’s handling of Brooklyn’s annual West Indian American Day Parade the day prior despite a mass shooting on the parade route that wounded five people—describing the incident as just one “nut” with a gun.
During the mayor’s weekly wide-ranging press conference, he cast the incident, which left one man dead and another critically wounded, as an anomaly among a mostly “peaceful” parade and the preceding J’ouvert celebration.
“Let’s be clear: one nut shot five people, one,” Adams said. “When you look at that one person, who we’re going to find, that shot five people, you remove them from the equation. You got hundreds of thousands of people that were out this weekend and really heard the call of a peaceful J’ouvert and a peaceful West Indian Day.”
However, the mayor said his administration “always evaluates” its security measures following the annual parade. His chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, added that there will be an “assessment” of what—if anything—the city could have done differently.
“[The] NYPD, a number of people from the community, a number of people from different agencies will sit down and have a discussion on what additional means if any are necessary?” Lewis-Martin said. “We have to do an assessment, which the team will do. And they talk about what worked this year and what steps we can do better.”
Police believe the incident, which occurred Monday afternoon along the parade route on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section, involved one shooter firing into a crowd of spectators. NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said the gunman, whom cops believe to be in their 20s, had a target in mind when they shot into the crowd and did not care who else was hit.
One of the victims, a 25-year-old man, died from a gunshot to his abdomen at Kings County Hospital on Monday night. The other four victims were wounded and three have already been released from the hospital.
The shooting took place amid stepped-up NYPD security along the parade route this year, including thousands of cops, aerial drones and police officers wanding parade-goers for concealed weapons at points of entry. The heightened security came as the event has been marred by several violent incidents in recent years.
Outside of the shooting, Adams insisted the NYPD took a “proactive approach” to the parade’s security this year that led to the department capturing 25 guns ahead of the J’ouvert celebration and an additional 10 along the parade route. He also pointed to his administration’s previous move to shorten J’ouvert so it no longer runs all night as another way to decrease the chance of violence.
Additionally, he said many community-based organizations were involved in de-escalation to ensure safety during this year’s festivities.
But Adams appeared to concede there was no way the NYPD could have stopped the one shooter, when asked several times what else the cops could do to prevent similar incidents in future years.
“How do you stop a nut from taking a gun and shooting into a crowd?” the mayor said. “We were proactive, 25 guns removed off the street…So no [there’s] telling how many shootings we prevented.”
With reporting by Dean Moses
