Violence Can’t Continue

Friday night in Harlem, a basketball tournament called the Kingdome was doing exactly what it was built to do. Kids and grown men were on the court at King Towers, playing ball, laughing, being a community. Kinu Rochford was one of the players. He was 35. He’d played college ball, gone pro overseas, come home to Brooklyn, and kept showing up to mentor young players in his neighborhood. He was warming up for his next game when someone walked up and shot him in the head. Twice. Two more people were hit. The shooter ran off. No arrests yet. This wasn’t some anonymous kid caught in crossfire. This was a guy who made it out and came back. And it happened blocks from a “Stop the Gun Violence” rally.

I keep asking myself: why are we back here? Why is it normal that a man can walk onto a public basketball court and execute someone in front of a crowd, and we all just brace for the next one? Why do we treat gun violence in public housing like weather — something that just happens, that we shrug at, instead of something we’re allowed to be furious about and demand an end to? Because that’s the real rot underneath this. If this happened on a court on the Upper East Side or in Brooklyn Heights, the city would not sleep until there were arrests, cameras, foot patrols, a task force. It would be front page for a month. Instead it’s a local news story, a vigil, a hashtag, and then quiet until the next one.

NYCHA residents are New Yorkers. Full stop. They pay taxes, they raise families, they build this city. But we’ve let public housing become a place where violence is expected, where the outdoor space looks like a forgotten lot instead of a park, where resources for kids and mentorship programs run on fumes and volunteers instead of real funding. One of the coaches at Friday’s rally said it plainly — they have almost no resources, and they do the work anyway because someone has to. That should embarrass all of us.

And where is the political will? Where are the NYCHA success stories — the executives, the artists, the athletes, the politicians who grew up in these buildings and made it — standing up and saying this is not acceptable, not one more time? Not a statement. Not a tweet. A plan. Because here’s what actually changes this: education that doesn’t stop at graduation. Real, funded youth programs, not the ones held together with duct tape by coaches with no budget. Outdoor spaces that look like something worth being proud of, not something to survive. Jobs. Mentorship that isn’t volunteer-only. And a serious, sustained conversation about how a young man can walk onto a public court with a gun in the first place.

If we actually believe that public housing residents are neighbors and not a separate class of citizens, we have to fund it as we mean it. If they rise, we rise. All of us. New York doesn’t get to call itself a great city while writing off entire neighborhoods as background noise for the evening news. Rest in peace, Kinu. This should not have happened to you, and it should not keep happening to anyone.