Just had a conversation with a young guy in Crown Heights about the fireworks situation in Brooklyn that might be helpful to folks trying to understand what’s happening — the source is a lifelong resident whose block has been featured in at least one viral fireworks video.
The supply chain is pretty simple. There’s a widespread understanding that you can buy fireworks on the cheap right now from neighboring states, so folks are carpooling to those states to make those purchases, coming back and selling fireworks at higher prices.
Some of the fireworks are being set off by competing groups of young people from different blocks and areas — there are battles. In addition to fireworks, young people are also attacking their rivals with squirt guns. It’s summertime in Brooklyn. People are trying to have fun.
What’s kind of amazing, my guy said, is that cliques that normally do not socialize are having these fireworks battles with each other. Sure it’s noisy and getting a lot of attention but, he noted, he’d rather see these kids using fireworks than guns.
Following lots of complaints and social media talk, the NYPD and the de Blasio administration are now launching a multi-agency crackdown on “suppliers, distributors and possessors” of illegal fireworks. This will include interstate “sting operations” to “disrupt supply chains.”
All of this comes, of course, amid ongoing protests challenging the same quality of life style policing that has traumatized many of the communities where these fireworks are now proliferating.
If there’s a conspiracy here, it seems most likely to emerge in the charging documents prosecutors will file sweeping up a bunch of young men of color who bought and resold some fireworks during a hot and stressful summer.
Just something to keep in mind.
Just something to keep in mind.
