Growing Calls to Cancel J’Ouvert

After three shootings that left four people wounded and two dead during Sunday night’s J’Ouvert celebration — which precedes the West Indian Labor Day Parade in Brooklyn — Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday that officials will review security protocol and put every option on the table, Politico reported.

The shootings came less than a week after the mayor vowed to make the violence-plagued event “safer than ever this year.”

An NYPD official said the department doubled the number of police officers — from 1,700 last year to 3,400 this year — and deployed more than 200 light towers and 42 police cameras, Politico said.

“We do not accept what happened last night,” de Blasio told reporters at a press conference before the parade. “We are going to redouble our efforts. I think some of what we did clearly helped — the additional light towers helped, the additional police presence helped — but we’ve got to find any other measures that will help and we have to do it with the community.”

“Every idea will be on the table. Every option will be on the table,” the mayor said.

Walter T. Mosley, Assemblyman for Brooklyn’s 57th district representing Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, and parts of Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy, called for the suspension of the annual celebration.

“I am at a loss for words as to the level of violence that took place at last night’s annual J’Ouvet celebration,” Mosley wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday following the event. “It cannot be tolerated that this event has appeared to become a predetermined point of destination to settle individual disputes through violence.

“After long consideration, it is with a heavy heart that I call on a suspension of the J’Ouvet celebration. I can no longer support this event and hope for the best when it comes to the well being of our fellow New Yorkers. This celebration of cultural heritage, on a day fought so hard for by our brothers and sisters in the labor movement, has unfortunately become synonymous with gun violence and until we as a community can collectively come together to address the root cause of these violent acts I cannot lend my support to it going forward,” he wrote.

Councilwoman Laurie Cumbo, however, said the only way to ‘cancel’ J’Ouvert is through imposing “Martial Law.”

“Talking about simply canceling the event is maybe good political speak, but the reality of the situation is that J’Ouvert is a celebration that happens over the Labor Day weekend, and so when people talk about canceling it, there is far more that happens during J’Ouvert than simply the parade,” Cumbo told Gothamist.com.

“It’s a very outdoor event. So when you say cancel it—how do you cancel block parties, barbecues, events, people wanting to be outside, people having outdoor parties, people practicing, trucks being outside, parties happening.

“The only way that I can imagine that you cancel it, if that’s what we’re seriously talking about, would be to impose a curfew, and maybe bringing in the National Guard, or martial law, and make it so people can’t go outside of their homes the night before Labor Day. That’s really what canceling it looks like,” Cumbo said.

“To think that those issues are going to go away during Labor Day, or they’re going to go away during the summer month—we can’t cancel summer; we can’t cancel the weekend; we can’t cancel J’Ouvert. We can’t keep canceling. We’ve got to work at what is the root of the problem,” she added.