'Living In A War Zone': NYC Illegal Fireworks Still Spark Anger

NEW YORK CITY — Every night, Johanna Clearfield braces inside her Flatbush apartment for a firework bombardment.

Her four cats and pit bull cower nervously under her bed as pyrotechnics thunder through her closed windows. She phones 911 and 311 regularly, but fireworks still spark, crackle and rattle outside.

After a two-year siege, Clearfield is fed up and ready to give up her two-bedroom, $1,500 unicorn of a New York City apartment.

“It’s not just a little noise, it’s like living in a war zone,” she said.

@ByMattTroutman
More vid #illegalfireworks @News12BK @ericadamsfornyc @MayorsPEU @NYPD70Pct https://t.co/WZdmvZ1pnz pic.twitter.com/dhlBqiZ6jT
— Johanna (@Johannaclear) June 25, 2021

The feeling of life during wartime is not unfamiliar to New Yorkers who stayed in the city during the first coronavirus pandemic summer.

Nightly illegal firework displays prompted an explosion of 311 complaints — at one point, those calls were up 4,000 percent.

The barrage of fireworks complaints is significantly lower so far this year.

New Yorkers made 7,317 complaints about fireworks since April this year — a 61 percent drop from the 18,731 reported during the same span in 2020, a Patch analysis of 311 data shows.

But it's still 10 times more than all the fireworks complaints between April and July 2019, according to data.

The two-year surge prompted city officials to launch a "NYC Illegal Firework Task Force," a multi-agency group that aims to stop the flow of high-grade pyrotechnics into the city.

Mayor Bill de Blasio last week claimed the task force had "real success."

"This year, we started earlier with more intensity, with more effort, and we've had some big busts in the last few days, some real great efforts by our law enforcement colleagues going out there and seizing illegal fireworks," he said during a daily briefing. "It’s making a big difference."

The big busts included about 30 arrests and tens of thousands of dollars of fireworks seized, Sheriff Joe Fucito said, encouraging New Yorkers to follow the task force's work on Twitter through #NYCFireworksTaskForce.

But Clearfield isn't impressed.

"This task force is a hashtag," she said.

Clearfield, a former writer with Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" who is active in social justice causes, lives in the 11226 ZIP Code.

More firework complaints — 1,873 — came from that ZIP Code than any other in the city between April and July 2020, data shows.

And this year the 11226 ZIP Code is still near the top of fireworks complaints.

Since April, there have been 309 complaints, according to 311 data.

Clearfield said she never sees NYPD come to enforce firework complaints in her neighborhood.

"The police ignore it in Flatbush and the police would never ignore it in Park Slope,” she said.

During last year's firework surge, Clearfield ran into Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams — now the front-runner for the city's next mayor — at a community event. She said Adams brushed off her firework complaints.

“He said, ‘Well these are just kids having fun, we don’t need to get the police tangled up in this,'” she said.

Clearfield said Adams also told her to "reach out to your neighbors," meaning the people setting the fireworks off. Adams has faced criticism for similar advice, especially after a woman appeared to follow it last year and was shot and killed, the New York Post reported.

Jonah Allon, a spokesperson for Adams, said the borough president "stands by what he has consistently said on this issue."

"Whenever we can safely communicate with our neighbors to address quality-of-life issues without involving the police, we should do so," he said. "Our neighbors should not engage with individuals they feel are dangerous. If Brooklyn experiences a surge in fireworks complaints in the months ahead, he will do the same thing he did last summer: engage with community residents on the ground to find a peaceful resolution.”