Working methodically in the hot August afternoon sun, city workers used heavy machinery to place city-branded concrete bollards along the edge of a vacant lot on Clinton Avenue.
It was done not to prepare for a festival or parade, but to mourn.
The project would form a barrier for a balloon release and memoriam later that day — honoring 14-year-old Zah'nia Barr, who was gunned down during a street party days earlier.
In the wake of her death, Mayor Malik Evans decried these pop-up gatherings and the city’s summer-long struggle to contain them. The city had urged people to stay home, and police had planned a restrained but sizable presence to maintain order. Neighbors had met for weeks, organizing foot patrols to be the front line of any enforcement effort.
Yet, roughly 24 hours after Barr was killed, 34-year-old Shakara Green was shot in another random hail of gunfire as another unsanctioned party spilled into the streets in northeast Rochester after the Puerto Rican Festival. Eight others were wounded in the North Clinton area that weekend. And then came the questions: What could have been done differently?
On one hand, city and neighborhood leaders say they don't want a police state that turns celebratory gatherings into cause for arrest. Yet the mayor has made late-night gatherings in public spaces illegal. And police say such events inevitably devolve to people blocking streets and fighting. Elsewhere, cities have taken a more proactive — some would say aggressive — approach, surveilling social media, enacting laws and specifically targeting so-called street takeovers with arrests.
Still others have taken a longer view, urging more youth programming, workforce training and other activities to better connect neighbors and build community.
Evans is having none of it.
"This is not a conversation about, 'We need to give people something to do,' all that other stuff that people are talking about," Evans said in an interview. "This is about stopping individuals that are cold-blooded killers that have no problem shooting innocent people ... That's what this is about."
And that can seem unpreventable.
Because while Evans has highlighted the decline in city shootings — which have fallen to near record lows this year — one thing that remains stubbornly persistent is the propensity for people to fire into crowds. So far this year, 21.2% of all shootings in the city have had multiple victims, according to data from the Rochester Police Department. That's the highest share in more than a decade. While the actual number of shootings fluctuates, at the peak of the city's gun violence in 2021, the number that involved multiple victims was 15.5% of the total.
The limits of prevention
The city of Rochester has been under a Gun Violence State of Emergency for the entirety of Evans's administration, which began in 2022. That allows the city to take unusual actions, like shuttering businesses deemed hot spots for violence.
Most recently, after an incident over the Fourth of July weekend in the East End which seven people were shot and one stabbed, Evans announced a ban on public gatherings of more than 10 past 11 p.m.
Even without the ban, police have the authority to clear blocked streets and break up unruly crowds. In these latest street gatherings, though, police have made no arrests, and Police Chief David Smith – speaking about clearing North Clinton Avenue the night Barr was later shot – said that “the goal is not to go out and arrest folks, the goal is to get them to leave.”
The general consensus, from community members to the mayor, is that there's only so much authorities can do.
"We just can't be everywhere at all times," Evans said. "We can't police like that unless we live in a police state, which I don't want to live in. We can't control everyone's behavior, and we got to have people take a little bit of personal responsibility as it relates to how they're going to hang out and enjoy their time."
For the past decade, Ida Pérez has lived on Scrantom Street, a quarter-mile strip between North Clinton Avenue and St. Paul Street. She heads the El Camino Neighborhood Association and serves in the Northeast Safety Committee, an organization formed partly to address the street parties that typically trail the Puerto Rican Festival.
She doubts there is any way to stop the gatherings from happening. The goal, she said, should be to try to ensure safety.
"We have walked these streets, all of these streets, from Upper Falls to East Ridge Road, letting people know, 'Hey, we want everyone to be safe,'" Pérez said. "Our message is that we want people to be safe. We don't want to stop you from celebrating, but we want people to be safe."
Safety, she said, requires communication, from the administration to the police to the gatherers themselves. She said that often doesn't happen in a meaningful way.
"It doesn't matter how much we plan," Pérez said, "if the neighborhood leaders, the residents and the police don’t know one another and aren’t all on the same page.”
A moving target
Rochester Police Capt. Greg Bello was among the officers who responded to Barr's killing in the early morning hours of Aug. 1.
Police have made no arrests in the case.
"We need people to step forward and help us," Bello said. "You should be able to get together as a group and celebrate something like the Puerto Rican festival. You're celebrating cultural heritage. You should be able to get together as a group and celebrate that — 50 or 100 people — and not have to worry about getting shot."
Bello pointed to another incident in July, when rapper 38 Spesh, a Rochester native whose real name is Justin Harrell, hosted a music video shoot on Chili Avenue. Hundreds came out to the shoot, which Bello described as well-organized, and Harrell's security team kept the crowd under control. After the shoot ended, a street party allegedly became unruly, resulting in police deploying PepperBall launchers.
It was the first time the department had used that crowd control measure in about five years, Bello said.
"You had around the last 100 people, give or take, that started to act up and started to have issues, and that's where that kind of forced our hand to act," Bello said. "When the issues start becoming safety issues and they start taking over the street, when fights broke out and then when actions get turned against us, that elicits a response."
RPD’s account has been challenged on social media by witnesses who claim they were there, and that matters remained peaceful until police moved in. WXXI News has filed an open records request for officer body-worn camera video.
There is another approach to large gatherings, which is to get out front, deploy officers ahead of the event, be professional but be visible, and set the tone. The argument is that any equivocating only exacerbates problems.
"If you're going to arrest people, arrest people," said Cedric Alexander, a national law enforcement expert who was Rochester’s interim police chief in 2005, and now serves as the interim public safety director for the city of South Fulton, Georgia. "There can be no middle road of just soft shoeing this s—t."
In South Fulton, he said, police have an intelligence unit that monitors social media and tries to pre-empt these pop-up, large-scale gatherings and anticipate how they will move given the police response.
Other departments in New York have also taken to monitoring social media in an effort to get ahead of so-called "teen takeover" events. In February, Westchester County announced its Real Time Crime Intelligence Center and its Department of Public Safety had begun that process in order to give preemptive information to municipal police. Monroe County launched a state-run Regional Investigative Operations Center in Greece last year. State officials did not immediately respond to interview requests.
Suffolk County Police formed a Street Takeover Task Force in November 2024, and authorities there have made it illegal to gather within 200 feet of such an event, at the risk of misdemeanor charges. Rochester has yet to take such an approach. The Evans administration instead is focusing on how to prevent violence without over policing.
Rochester City Council President Miguel Meléndez is among those who was out during the celebrations on North Clinton Avenue. He had worked for months alongside Pérez and other members of the Northeast Safety Committee to try to keep the events under control.
Looking at the violence that occurred, the spread of videos of the shootings on social media, and the community's seeming desensitization to violence, he said the change that needs to come is deeper.
"It can't just be dependency on law enforcement," Meléndez said. "It can't be dependency on the government itself stepping in and doing this by themselves. I think the community has some of the solutions. That they have some of the answers."
Includes reporting by investigations and enterprise editor Brian Sharp.
