Police Department Officials Point To Success on Guns

After an illegally obtained gun nearly killed a detective and injured another in a Bronx shootout this week, Mayor Bloomberg lamented that there are "too many guns" on city streets.

Police are the first to agree with that assessment, but yesterday officials told The New York Sun that the local illegal gun market has suffered a significant blow this year.

Since January, undercover officers have already made a gun trafficking arrest for each of the days of the year. Besides the 365 arrests for illegal gun sales as of this week, police officials also said they have obtained 472 illegal guns through seizures and undercover purchases.

Their efforts included a year-long sting operation in the Soundview section of the Bronx that ended in June and yielded 39 illegal guns, some drugs, and the arrest of a trafficker. Another undercover investigation that ended in February netted three Harlem-based gun traffickers and six illegal firearms.

As in every case of a criminal gun arrest, the police are now working to find out who put an illegal gun into the hands of Jermaine Taylor, 18. He is accused of shooting two people in front of a bodega in July and shooting detectives William Gonzalez and Daniel Rivera in the Bronx on Wednesday.

To their disappointment, officials said that when they recovered a 9-mm Italian gun from Mr. Taylor they found that its serial number — which could lead them to the gun seller — was scraped off.

Still, an NYPD spokesman, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, said lab experts have been working to make out the destroyed serial number using a variety of laboratory techniques. They often succeed in such efforts, he added. Police officials said historical data on local trafficking arrests was not available, although the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives reports that 1,018 firearms were recovered in New York City from illegal gun sales in 2006. Meanwhile, gun possession arrests for the first nine months of the year have dropped slightly from 2006, to 2,725 from 2,863.

Noting the difference in the thousands of gun possession arrests and the three-digit number of gun traffickers arrested, a group of elected officials this week called on the police department to make gun trafficking arrests publicly available through the CompStat crime statistic system.

The officials, including Assemblyman Karim Camara, state Senator Eric Adams, and City Council Member David Yassky, said regularly publicizing the numbers would allow New Yorkers to know if illegal gun sales were happening in their neighborhoods, and suggested it could drive police to make more arrests.

An ATF special agent who works with the NYPD on gun trafficking cases, Joseph Green, said the discrepancy could be attributed to the complicated nature of trafficking investigations, while Mr. Browne responded by pointing to the deaths of James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews. The two undercover detectives were killed in a gun trafficking operation in Staten Island in 2003.

"Buying guns undercover is one of the most dangerous things someone can do," Mr. Green said. "Buying a gun is not like buying a TV: you can't just get them."