Darcel Clark sees the effects of the proliferation of guns in the city up close and personal, every day. As the chief criminal prosecutor in the Bronx, the one city borough where the numbers keep spiking, even when they decrease in other boroughs, she sees the bodies of younger and younger men and women, many innocent victims simply caught in the crossfire of someone else’s beef, and speaks with grieving families. 

But she’s also charged with prosecuting shooters who themselves are getting younger and younger. We’ve all see the shocking video of a 13-year-old, on a Bronx street corner, holding a gun, waiting to shoot another teen in the park across the street. 

Clark joined In Focus because she, too, is outraged by what she is seeing. She said, in her six years as Bronx D.A., this is the most disturbing because the victims, and the perpetrators, just keep getting younger. 

She talks about what her office has done, reaching out to the community to try to convince kids to find another path, to talk them out of the allure of local street gangs. And she also points to her office’s work with the NYPD.

She said that, as the shooting numbers rise, so do the number of arrests for gun possession, possibly warding off even more tragedies. She also speaks to the fact that guns are not manufactured in the Bronx, but are brought there from other states with more lax gun laws in a “pipeline” that needs to be turned off.