Akeal Christopher was shot and killed three years ago in Brooklyn. Now his mother is calling for a return to the controversial police practice: ‘They took away stop and frisk and left us with nothing but streets full of guns’

Akeal Christopher lay facedown on a Brooklyn street, his legs twisted and convulsing from a bullet that rested deep in his brain.

Minutes before, the 14-year-old and seven childhood friends had been walking down Cornelia Street in Bushwick. They walked in a loose line, passing rows of houses where neighbors lingered outside, drinking and talking. At the crosswalk, where Cornelia meets Evergreen Avenue, the boys stopped and waited for the light. The woman in the corner house, whose window faced the street, heard them joking over the details of the graduation party earlier that night.

And then the crackle of gunfire.

The sound electrified the late June air, paralyzing people on their stoops, patrons at the bar across the street, and the group of boys. Only the shooter’s friend and the the woman from the corner house moved toward the body – he to scavenge Christopher’s belongings, she to try and save his life. A former EMS technician, the woman breathed into the boy whose skin was mottled with grit and whose ears spilled blood.

“Your mama is coming,” she told him as his eyes flitted and he labored for breath.

His mother, Natasha Christopher, was at home with her two younger sons. When she would finally see him at the hospital later that night, his eyes would be still and his face clear of dirt and blood. For two weeks, he would remain in a medically induced coma, his mother poised on her knees at his bedside. Between the deep heaves of the ventilator, she would spend her days bargaining with God, and her nights whispering promises to him that he would not die in vain and that she would find “the monster” who shot him.

That was in 2012.

Three years later, the shooter, who most likely still lives in the neighborhood, remains at large. The failure of the police to find justice for Akeal and others like him has led her to one firm and yet seemingly counterintuitive conviction: stop and frisk should be reinstated to save lives in the black community.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Natasha Christopher at a memorial for her son. Photograph: Maria Smilios

Instituted in New York City in the 1990s by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and then police commissioner Bill Bratton to fix a city crippled by crime, stop and frisk aimed to improve quality of life in a far more serious manner than Broken Windows, which had focused primarily on petty criminals – turnstile jumpers, squeegee men and graffiti taggers.

This new method of policing aimed to reduce the number of guns on the street and deter would-be criminals. Within a few years, crime in the city began to plummet, and by 2012, almost two decades later, the city went from having 9.6% of the nation’s homicides to having 2.3%.

While the reduction was celebrated, it came at a high price: the singling out of young black men, who make up 23% of the city’s population yet accounted for more than 50% of the stops. And yet the police kept stopping and frisking, until last year. On 12 August 2013, stop and frisk was ruled to be unconstitutional, and was officially banned from the city.

For many in the black community, the ruling came as a great victory – but not for Natasha Christopher. She believes it left the community more vulnerable to crime.

A quick-fire, robust woman with a heavy Caribbean lilt, Christopher doesn’t mince her words, as I learned over the course of a series of interviews. She was raised in a large, close-knit family in Crown Heights, her father a Trinidadian immigrant who instilled in her a strong work ethic, respect for the law and honesty. With these values, she put herself through school and achieved her goal of becoming a nursing assistant.

Knowing the challenges that black boys face, she says she reached for those same values when parenting her three sons: enforcing early curfews, daily chores and a respect for authority.

She also talked to them regularly about being stopped and frisked, which, for her, was a normal part of being black and living in an urban community: “I didn’t like it. But if it protected them, then fine. I told them, the police are the law. You’re not above the law. They stop you, you listen and show them you have nothing to hide.”

They listened.

Akeal, with his baby face and devastating smile, grew into a good student who loved drawing, the Los Angeles Lakers and the inner workings of trains. As he moved deeper into his teenage years, Christopher grew confident that perhaps her sons would avoid the path of “so many black boys: drugs, gangs, prison or death”.

Then the unthinkable happened, calling into question everything she had done.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Natasha’s sons Christopher, 8, and Rashawn, 14. Photograph: Maria Smilios

She recoils when thinking about the young shooter, rabid and rage-filled, who mistook her son for a rival gang member. “He wanted someone dead, and he murdered my son,” she says. Her voice is straining, but she doesn’t break. “Now it’s time for the police to come back and start stopping, so this madness of black boys shooting each other will end. They took away stop and frisk and left us with nothing but streets full of guns and angry black men ready to shoot. It’s a damn epidemic.”

A recent article found that shootings in New York are up 9% since last year and homicides are up by almost 20%. But could stop and frisk have lowered those numbers?

Many believe it couldn’t have.

Out of the 4.4m stops between 2004 and 2012, the success rate in confiscating illegal guns was minimal: only 5,940 firearms were seized, equating to one-tenth of 1% of stops, a figure that Judge Scheinfeld, the ACLU, and many community leaders believe was too low to justify the daily violation of civil rights.

Not for Christopher. While she acknowledges stop and frisk engaged in racial profiling and should be modified, to her it was still working – and guns were being removed. “The number seems low, but 6,000 less guns equals hundreds of saved lives,” she says. “Until the black community stops killing each other, some people will have to be stopped and frisked. Everyone talks about civil rights, but what about my son’s civil rights? What about my civil rights?”

The ongoing debate of whose civil rights should be foremost often divides those who support stop and frisk and those who don’t. For Christopher and other New York mothers like Sandra Rougier, whose son was shot 17 times in 1999 while handing out birthday invitations, being stopped and frisked “shouldn’t be a problem if you have nothing to hide”.

The emotional quality of the reasoning resonates especially with those who have been touched by gun violence. But as Pastor Gil Monrose, head of Brooklyn’s God Squad, points out: “Trading one’s civil rights for another’s is not the solution.”

Monrose, who leads a collective of pastors working with police to decrease crime in the East Flatbush neighborhood, has been instrumental in helping Christopher move from a place of debilitating depression and grief to becoming her “son’s voice” for ending gun violence.

He agrees with Christopher that gun violence is a big problem in the black community. In his church alone, he tells me he’s burying at least four kids a year because of it. But he is quick to emphasize that the solution is not stop and frisk, a practice he sees as “harassing, demeaning, and a perpetuation of an ugly stereotype that only incites more violence”. For him, the solution is long term: “Create more jobs, invest in schools, build community centers, and dismantle gangs – then the kids won’t need the guns.”

Three years ago, Christopher would have agreed with Monrose’s perspective. But not anymore.

After receiving “that call all black mothers fear”, and having to bury her son in a New Jersey township because Brooklyn was too expensive, she wants immediate solutions.

“First, you need to the fix problem of guns coming in from states with weak gun laws,” she says. “My son’s killer is still out there probably shooting hoops and packing an illegal gun bought from one of those states. Better schools can’t fix that, but stop and frisk can.”

Pastor Monrose did well in pointing out how there is no simple, one-size-fits-all solution; rather, the issue is multi-layered, complex, replete with nuances and gray areas. Even Christopher one day tells me that she is not anti-gun; she supports second amendment rights but says: “Rights come with responsibility, and I see no responsibility.”

On a cool evening this past June, a small group gathered at the corner of Cornelia and Evergreen to remember Akeal. As his mother set down prayer candles underneath a canopy of orange balloons, gunfire punctuated the air just down the block. Minutes later, a group of boys on bikes raced passed, sending two balloons floating into the sky.

Christopher froze for a moment and watched them, then quietly returned to arranging the candles amid the sound of nearing sirens.