NCJ Number
215690
Date Published
November 2005
Length
50 pages
Annotation
This study evaluated whether the Brooklyn pilot program achieved the four goals of the New York City Gun Court initiative.
Abstract
In testing the four key components of the New York City Gun Court initiative: increase in successful prosecution of gun possession cases; utilization of the designated Supreme Court part for indicted program cases; more consistent sentencing; and more swift dispositions, in all but one respect, indictment rates, the outcomes met the program’s goals. The vast majority of indicted program-period cases were sent to Part 31, the designated gun court courtroom. Part 31 greatly increased in the percentages of cases with the mandatory imprisonment sentence of at least 1 year, and completed cases more swiftly. Serious crime in New York City began to decline in the mid-1990s, in large part as a result of new approaches in crime control. A recent addition to crime control efforts has been the gun court initiative. The program is designed to reduce gun-related violent crime by focusing on the arrest, successful prosecution, and swift and consistent punishment of persons in possession of firearms in public places. The key component to the program is to assign felony gun-possession cases to a single, designated Supreme Court part (i.e. courtroom). The gun court initiative began in Brooklyn in 2003 with the official opening of Supreme Court Part 31 (the designated courtroom for the processing of indicted felony gun-possession cases from five precincts in Brooklyn).There are four clearly articulated goals for the initiative stated above. This research study was designed to evaluate whether the pilot program in Brooklyn achieved the goals of the gun court initiative. Exhibits and tables