108 BROOKLYN NEWS WWW.BROOKLYN-USA.ORG A Smarter Gun, A SAFER CITY Borough President Adams’ affinity for technology runs deep. He has been one of New York City’s most vocal champions for coding curriculum and textbook-free classrooms, offering a new vision for educating and enriching students in Brooklyn’s schools. His office has been forging a number of partnerships with a variety of private sector enterprises that are organizing and activating data to achieve goals ranging from energy efficiency and traffic flow to financial literacy and home heating. Additionally, he is deeply committed to the advancement of technology in the area that has been the focus of the majority of his career: public safety. From helping to develop the New York City Police Department (NYPD)’s groundbreaking CompStat system that has been a national model for focusing departmental resources in areas impacted by crime to pressing law enforcement to adopt technology solutions on matters such as community engagement and officer training, Borough President Adams has pushed a forward-thinking mindset in policing since his time as a member of New York’s Finest. He has taken the same approach to firearms as well, particularly in his time at Brooklyn Borough Hall. In February 2015, Borough President Adams released “Gun Violence in New York: Deploying Common Sense Technology,” a report that outlined a variety of available responses to advance public safety. Most notably, he encouraged the NYPD to create pilot programs to explore firearm advancements such as fingerprint recognition technology, in order to protect law enforcement officers as well as to assist in perfecting biometrics and micro-cameras mounted on guns that activate when the weapon is drawn; he has envisioned this latter concept as having the ability to both remove public doubt from law enforcement surrounding police shootings and the assurance to the public that law enforcement will have greater incentive to follow protocol. “We need to make guns safer, for responsible owners and law enforcement who use them as well as for the general public,” wrote Borough President Adams in his report, a copy of which can be found on his website, brooklyn-usa.org. “New York can and should lead the nation in combating gun violence, and there are tangible steps we can take with utilizing technology and strengthening common-sense safety measures that will save lives.” Borough President Adams’ smart At the New York City Smart Gun Symposium he hosted at Brooklyn Borough Hall, Borough President Adams released a “Why Smart Guns” graphic analysis of the statistical basis for advancing this technology. gun advocacy gained momentum in the months ahead, leading him to lobbying both sides of the political spectrum in Congress during a visit to Washington, DC this past January, a trip that included his invitation by CNN to participate in “Guns in America,” a nationally-televised town hall with President Barack Obama at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. The high-level dialogue brought this technology into greater coastto coast consciousness, particularly how political gridlock has prevented meaningful research or investment into exploring the viability of this technology. “A gun is a product, no different from any other,” said Borough President Adams during an appearance on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” “We have not allowed the evolution of Photo Credit: Ron Ricardo/Brooklyn BP’s Office hand guns to be a safer tool that is used in a recreational fashion or in a public protection fashion, and that cannot continue to happen.” In early August, in collaboration with Seattle-based gun safety advocacy group Washington Ceasefire and locally-based New Yorkers Against Gun Violence (NYAGV), Borough President Adams hosted the New York City Smart Gun Symposium, the largest-to-date gathering on advancing smart gun technology. The convening at Brooklyn Borough Hall, which was opened by a message from Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Obama, brought together global experts from government, higher education, and law enforcement, as well as advocates who have been deeply committed to gun safety for decades. Later that month, Borough President Adams kicked off his Smart Gun Design Competition, putting out the call for teams from New York City colleges and universities to create the technology — be it biometrics, radio frequency identification, or otherwise — that will prevent unauthorized users from firing a gun. At the conclusion of the contest — held in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ), NYAGV, and the Smart Tech Challenge Foundation — he will award a $1 million prize from his capital budget to the institution that has designed the best smart gun technology concept. A committee of jurists will select the five best submitted ideas and allocate $10,000 in seed money from Borough President Adams’ discretionary budget to further their work; additionally, these entries will be evaluated for their viability to be assessed further through testing in collaboration with the NYPD. Teams can register online for the competition through January 1, 2017 by visiting brooklyn-usa.org. It is clear that there is a way to build a smart gun; Borough President Adams is now working hard on expanding the collective will. His efforts are validated by recent public surveys, including one earlier this year by Johns Hopkins University of almost 4,000 American households; more than three quarters of those surveyed said they would consider a smart gun if they were going to purchase a firearm, with more than 40 percent of those surveyed expressing definitive interest. Also importantly, several gun rights groups, including the National Rifle Association (NRA) and The Second Amendment Foundation, have given their blessing to smart gun technology so long as they are not mandated and can be proven to be reliable. With the recent analysis conducted by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman that showed an incredible 89 percent of guns recovered in Brooklyn since 2010 are trafficked from outside New York State, Borough President Adams is more confident than ever that a smarter gun is the smartest approach to a safer city.
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