July 2019 | Rolling Stone | 73
the NYPD’s Brooklyn North command. It was the longest stretch without a
murder since modern rec ord-keeping began in 1993. But in the months after
White’s death, homicides started to occur with alarming frequency in Brook-
lyn North, one of the city’s two busiest homicide commands. By early April,
21 people had been killed, nearly double the number of the previous winter.
New York is arguably safer than it’s ever been — 2018 saw the fewest mur-
ders in 70 years. But small clusters of extreme violence remain. Most homi-
cides are still considered gang-related, but different crews, often defined by a
single block or housing development, fight for control of diminishing ungen-
trified territory, with beefs starting as much on social media as on the street.
Brooklyn North allowed ROLLING STONE to shadow its homicide detec-
tives during these eventful months, following them into crime scenes and
across the arc of investigations. Tensions between these communities and
the NYPD run high, an unsurprising consequence of repeated incidents of
police violence in minority neighborhoods. But a homicide detective’s ability
to earn the trust of those touched by violence is imperative. “With all the
advances — forensics and police science and computers — I think it makes it
easier investigating cases,” says Detective Thomas Handley, a 27-year veteran
of the NYPD. “But there’s tools like interrogations and talking to people — you
know, a kid on the street — that come with time.... Everything works on trust
in these investigations.”
Technology has changed the job — records that might have taken hours of
footwork to obtain are available instantly — but other elements of the work
are the same as ever. It’s still all-consuming. Detectives sometimes spend the
night on a cot in the squad’s locker room. And they are haunted even by their
successes. “You deal in death,” says Handley. “When we are good, it means
we are good on someone’s loss. How does anyone feel victorious?” SAM FREILICH
The Precinct
“Nobody’s welcome in the office. I’m
not trying to be a dick. It’s been like
that for 20 years,” says Lt. Samuel
Herrera about homicide’s 90th Precinct
squad room, where Fox News is often
playing on a TV atop the file cabinets.
Keeping Score
“This is the 75, we’ve got nothing but
stories,” says a detective in East New
York’s 75th Precinct, once known as the
city’s most violent. During the peak, in
1993, there were 126 homicides in the
75th. Last year, there were seven.