After last year’s West Indian Parade, where an administration lawyer who worked for Governor Andrew Cuomo was killed in a shooting, Cuomo had taken extra precautions to ensure the safety of everyone who attended the parade in 2016. He doubled the amount of police officers on the ground, placed light towers in the areas for the festival from Sunday night to Monday morning, and added more patrol cars and cameras for the festivities, according to NBC news. However these precautions still did not stop the shootings that killed two people at J’ouvert, a pre-dawn celebration that occurs before the start of the West Indian parade.

Despite the violence that occurred at the pre-dawn celebration, no one was injured at the parade. The West Indian Parade collected over one million people with a Caribbean heritage to celebrate their traditions. Crowds waved their flags from Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, Haiti,  and other Caribbean nations in a joyful expression of ethnic heritage and cultural pride. The parade even attracted people with other cultural backgrounds to take part in the festivities.

Yet the violence that had occurred last year and this year “has given the parade a bad name”, said Khadisha Telfer, 24, who has been attending the parade since she was 12 years old. ” There’s violence in the community itself. Not everything should be blamed on the parade because [the violence] happened here”.