Bilal Jacks was hanging out on a Brownsville sidewalk last month when he heard a man shouting down the block.
“Excuse me for a second,” Jacks said. He headed to the source of the commotion: An argument between a man and a woman had broken out on the sidewalk in front of a deli on Mother Gaston Boulevard.
He quickly worked to calm the situation down, and within a minute or so, the shouting stopped.
Jacks is a lifelong Brownsville resident who works with a nonprofit called We Build The Block, and is also a participant in the Brownsville Safety Alliance. At least twice a year since 2020, nonprofit workers from the neighborhood spend a week calming disputes and responding to most 311 and 911 calls on certain blocks in the neighborhood.
This year's April installment took on a special significance, because organizers' approach is similar to what Mayor Zohran Mamdani has vowed do across the city: have trained professionals respond to a range of 311 and 911 calls, and limit police intervention to the most serious cases.
“ This is what it looks like, having people actually willing to put skin in the game, give their time, give their energy to say, ‘I'm committed to keeping my community safe, and here's what I have to contribute to that vision,’” Deputy Mayor for Community Safety Renita Francois told Gothamist at the event in April.
Guardians of safety
Brownsville is the neighborhood with the largest concentration of public housing in the country, according to the city. The poverty rate in the neighborhood was 32% in 2023, according to a study by NYU.
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The number of homicides in the precinct that covers the neighborhood has fluctuated and is currently down 80% so far this year, compared to the same period two years ago. In 2024, the precinct recorded 21 homicides for the year, a much higher rate than other precincts in Brooklyn. In 2025, the precinct had seven.
There has never been a shooting during a Brownsville Safety Alliance, organizers said.
Organizers said sending civilians to respond to some public safety calls is just one part of how the Brownsville Safety Alliance keeps the neighborhood safe.
Over the course of the week, various organizations set up foldable tables on Mother Gaston Boulevard and offer services to residents that range from fentanyl testing to help with setting up a bank account or signing up for an identification card.
“ IDs, a very essential thing,” said Dushoun Almond, an organizer known as “Bigga” who works with the nonprofit Brownsville In Violence Out. “The simplest thing is very serious.”
Dana Rachlin, a co-founder of We Build The Block, said safety trainings offered to residents and nonprofit workers throughout the week can have a long-lasting impact on public safety in Brownsville.
The trainings include things like how to administer naloxone and how to test drugs for fentanyl — to stop the bleed training and even how to safely handle a gun.
Throughout the week, firearm instructor Bryon Ruck used a barbershop on the block as a classroom. He set up a foldable white table toward the back of the shop and instructed nonprofit workers and residents on how to safely handle and unload handguns using replica pistols.
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The goal of the firearm training is safety, Rachlin said.
“We’ve had a ton of accidental discharges resulting in homicides. How can we not be responding urgently?” she said. “All of these things are harm reduction and helping community members be the guardians of their own safety and each other's safety.”
A template
Safety experts who spoke to Gothamist said they are encouraged by the event, but said scaling it up across the city could face red tape issues common in government.
“ It's an effective way of organizing neighborhoods and raising consciousness about public safety so that people start thinking about public safety as a community responsibility,” said Jeffrey Butts, a John Jay College professor who has studied the effect nonprofit groups have on public safety.
But, he added, it would be an enormous task to create sustainable infrastructure to expand an event like this across the city and have it throughout the year.
Liz Glazer, a public safety expert who previously worked in former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, said expanding the model could be a heavy lift – but also said renewed focus on the approach presents an opportunity.
“I think that is the major problem to be solved: ‘Do you have the organizational capacity in a neighborhood?’” Glazer said. “That's the challenge, but that also seems to me to be the opportunity because every neighborhood should have those kinds of organizations.”
Rachlin said organizers are hopeful that the policies that guide the event each year — like sharing 911 and 311 calls with civilian responders in real time — can be applied throughout city government.
“What we’re looking to scale are the policies and procedures of how we do this,” Rachlin said. “So that groups everywhere can be doing this because they already kind of are.”
