Crime coverage earns Daily News award

As if the pandemic wasn’t enough to keep the city on edge last year, New Yorkers had to endure an epidemic of violence, and the Daily News was there to put it in perspective, in award-winning fashion.

New York’s Hometown paper received a prize from the New York Press Club in the crime coverage category for a series of stories in 2020 about violence that plagued communities across the city from Claremont to Crown Heights.

The stories resonated with judges — and more importantly, with readers — because the reporters who hit the streets to talk with victims and witnesses, the writers who crafted the tales of pain and anguish and the editors who reviewed each article for content and dignity understood that crime stories aren’t just about shootings and homicides.

They’re about people. People like Davell Gardner, a 1-year-old boy killed by a stray bullet in Bedford-Stuyvesant on July 12, 2020, as he sat in his stroller at cookout in a Brooklyn park. Davell was fatally wounded when men stepped out of dark-colored SUV and opened fire at the Raymond Bush Playground on Madison St. near Marcus Garvey Blvd.

The boy’s heartbroken grandmother lashed out at the gunman who callously took the joy out of her life. But she did not spare the activists whom she said were being selective about their advocacy.

“They need to stop this gun violence,” the grandmother, Samantha Gardner, told The News in one of the award-winning articles.

“I feel like this: You all are ranting and raving about Black lives. But you take a life that was only a year and half old. And it’s not fair. It’s not fair to the grandparents. It’s not fair to the mother. It’s not fair to the father, the whole family in general.”