![]() People posting on different websites, such as Topix and Facebook, talk about how the public housing project in East New York is a rough place to live.įive years before the shooting of Gurley, an online forum on a website Topix raised the question about conditions at the Pink Houses.“This forum is about the Louis H. The fatal shooting of Gurley is thus the latest in a series of tragic events at the public housing project. “Why send rookie police officers to control a neighborhood like this?” he asks.Īccording to a statement released by William Bratton, the New York police chief, the housing project has seen two murders in the past year, and four robberies and two assaults in the last month. The man said he did not understand why the police have young and inexperienced police officers patrolling a neighborhood that has a reputation for crime and violence. One of the residents, an older man who did not wish to be named, said he has lived in on the eighth floor of the building, where the shooting happened, for three years. “People are coming together, they stand around and talk more outside the building, they don’t seem as distant from one another as they used to,” he says. D.I.S.G.R.A.C.E.,” one of the posters read.Īnother poster-linking the incident to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the chokehold that killed Eric Garner on Staten Island-calls for the community to “fight back” and join recent protests.Īccording to Walker, the community has been energized because of the shooting. A few posters remain pasted on the wall next to the waste shaft, calling for justice for Gurley and “all victims of police violence.” “How does a cop shoot a man in a stairway, in a housing project, while doing a vertical check, and call it an accident? This is a D.I.S.G.R.A.C.E. Residents at the Houses made a memorial for Gurley on the ground floor of the building after he was killed, but it was removed after “a week or so” by the management, a resident said. The Pink Houses were actually named after a former chairman of the New York State Housing Authority, a man dedicated to eradicating slums. Gurley had entered the pitch-black stairwell on the seventh floor with his girlfriend after a long wait for the elevator, and was shot in the chest by the officer Peter Liang, who had been in the job for less than 18 months. Gurley encountered two police officers who were doing what is called a “vertical patrol” of the narrow, unlit stairwell at the top of the building. Walker lives in the same building where Akai Gurley, the 28-year-old who was shot by the police on November 20, lived. ![]() “The neighborhood has had a reputation for a long time, and things haven’t been getting better.” “This is a dangerous neighborhood, still,” said David Walker, a 19-year-old who lives in the Pink Houses with his foster care family. In person and online, Pink Houses residents described a neighborhood where people expect the worst, and have done so for years. The public housing project, where a 28-year-old unarmed black man was shot to death by a rookie police officer last month, is in East New York, which has one of the highest crime rates in the city. They are called the Pink Houses, but apart from the pink equipment on the abandoned playgrounds, pink signs from the New York City Housing Authority, and, recently, a broken pink umbrella on the ground out front, they are colorless.
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