FOX Business’ Charles Payne reflects on crime in Harlem after niece shot by stray bullet: ‘Known violent criminals are roaming the streets’

FOX Business Network’s “Making Money” host Charles Payne tells Post readers about the shooting of his niece on the Harlem block where he grew up, and how crime has affected his old neighborhood. As told to Alex Oliveira.

New York City is going in the wrong direction.

Known violent criminals are roaming the streets, leading to innocent people getting hurt — such as my niece Keisha, who was hit by a stray bullet in Harlem earlier this month.

She was attending a memorial for someone on West 144th Street and Broadway, which is the block I grew up on.

That’s when some young kids ran around the corner with masks on and started shooting, almost indiscriminately. Everyone heard the gunfire, and they started to run.

My niece was shot in the buttocks and the bullet traveled to her stomach. She had to have an emergency four-hour surgery.

Another woman, who lives on the block and was hosting the memorial for her son, who died about a year ago, was hit in the arm.

Both are doing well — or better now, at least.

In the hospital, I was really impressed by the throngs of people from the block who came to see my niece. There were so many visitors, that I had to wait for around an hour in the lobby because her room was maxed out .

During that time, I had a chance to talk to a lot of people. What I heard was a lot of outrage — outrage over this idea that no one is looking out for them, no one is protecting them.

These are families, people who work, good people.

No one is looking out for them and it is getting worse, not better.

A big part of the problem is the apparent reluctance to decisively go after people who are violent.

Criminals who authorities know about, but who are allowed to walk free due to our criminal justice system. That’s the scary part.

For instance, I was shocked to hear about the increased gang activity as of late on my old block.

Police believe the shooting in which my niece was injured may have been gang-related, as The Post reported. It could be that someone near the memorial was targeted by a gang-member, and the bullets hit innocent victims.

It’s not even the block, per se, there’s been a massive spike in gangs in the area, to the north and south.

They meet in the middle, which sadly enough, is that neighborhood.

The irony is my family moved to the area in the 1970s because it was less violent. But because of gentrification, and now crime, when I go back things aren’t the same.

Even around five years ago, before the pandemic, I went to the block and it was really dead. I asked myself, “Well, what the heck, where’s the vibrancy?”

A lot of the spirit of the neighborhood has been zapped by people calling the cops on things we used to do as kids, like playing music on boomboxes or makeshift games of basketball in which we used a milk crate as a hoop.

I’ve seen more policing against someone smoking a joint than violent offenders.

People who are extremely violent toward others need to be put away for a very long time, throw away the key.

My niece came home this week. She still has staples in her and she’s still in extreme pain and very shaken.

While she was hospitalized, people on the block were talking about everyone getting together and protesting.

They’ve got to do something. Because we can’t live in a world where a person is standing on the block one minute, memorializing someone who passed away, and then the next, they’re shot.