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Mayor Malik Evans repeated his refrain at his first public safety update in 2026.
“I’m gratified by these numbers. I’m gratified because they tell us our strategy is working,” he said Tuesday. “I am not satisfied because no level of gun violence is satisfactory and will never be acceptable.”
Since 2021, Evans said, gun violence in Rochester has fallen almost 60 percent.
Even while trumpeting the marked decrease in violence, especially firearm crime, Evans emphasized that he would continue to use the anti-violence crime strategies he began with after first taking office in 2022.
In particular, Evans doubled down on his renewal of the gun violence state of emergency, a measure that grants the mayor and law department broad powers to “to protect life and property and to bring the emergency under control.”
The state of emergency was first declared in the summer of 2022, during a heightened period of violence in the city. It has been renewed by Evans each month since then.
The measure allows for quick mobilization of services from the Rochester Police Department, the Office of Violence Prevention, and the Office of Recreation and Human Services by requiring authorization only from the mayor.
It also gives the power to regulate traffic, establish curfews, control pedestrian movement, and close places of amusement or individual businesses. This has occurred under the East End Emergency Order, an additional measure that allows the chief of police to close down a number of streets and limit pedestrian access in the East End district at Evans’ discretion.
In addition, Corporation Counsel Patrick Beath mentioned at the update briefing that 15 businesses were issued closure orders in 2025 and that one closure has been issued so far in 2026.
“We, of course, hope to use these less and less, but we’re going to respond as we have to as violence happens,” Beath said.
“The Democrat and Chronicle did a story on the gun violence emergency; I think they were trying to find people who were opposed to it,” added Evans. “It’s hard to find those people.”
Gun violence has fallen since its height in 2021 and 2022, when there were 419 and 351 victims of nonfatal and fatal shootings, respectively. (In 2025, the total was 162, its lowest point since 2018.)
In 2022, a few months after originally proclaiming the gun violence state of emergency, Evans said: “I will keep (the state of emergency) in effect until the numbers get to where I like.”
On Tuesday, Evans indicated those numbers still are not where he’d like them to be.
“You might ask when we’re going to stop the gun violence emergency? Well, here’s your answer: when our numbers mirror what the numbers are in Pittsford,” he said. “I want to make sure that Rochester mirrors those numbers, then I’ll think about lifting the state of emergency.”
While official crime statistics from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department for the village of Pittsford are difficult to come by, the last widely reported shooting in the area was in the parking lot of Wegmans in April 2024.
“Is there an acceptable level (of gun violence) in Rochester because it’s an urban environment?” the mayor said. “My answer is, there is no acceptable level.
“If you’re talking to someone who was just involved in a shooting or got shot, what level of shooting do you think they would say was acceptable to them?” he continued. “Vision Zero is one of our most ambitious programs, and that says we want to have zero crash deaths. Why can’t we do the same thing for shootings?”
Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.
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