Sunset Park, Brooklyn — Our Sunset Park community is deeply shaken by this morning’s mass shooting. We have been speaking with the victims and their families, and we continue to tend to our community members and connect them to information and resources as they become available. Our thoughts are with them first and foremost.

We are grateful to our first responders, transit workers, and the heroic fellow commuters who immediately sprung into action to help get wounded passengers to safety. Their actions likely saved lives. We’re also thankful for our school principals’ quick response to keep our students safe and families informed.

We are still coming out of the collective trauma of this pandemic, and today’s events only add to our community’s pain. We have lost over 60,000 New Yorkers as a result of COVID-19. New Yorkers are experiencing record unemployment, extreme food insecurity, loss of jobs and housing, and inadequate services.

What our community needs right now is reassurance that we will not be abandoned in the aftermath of this morning’s incident — that our pain will not be used as a scapegoat for policies that won’t keep us safer. We know that more police presence on trains or in neighborhoods would not have prevented this. According to reports, police were on the scene and turned to commuters for help calling 911. We need investments in social services — housing, healthcare, and education—to cultivate true public safety, and just as urgently, we must stop the manufacturing and flow of guns in our country.

We are asking our partners in City, State and Federal government for a multi-faceted, effective, and evidence-based public safety response, including abundant mental health resources for the victims in the near-term, in addition to dramatic investments in violence prevention and interruption programs, full employment, and guaranteed housing moving forward — before more people get hurt.