Thirty-six alleged members of the Brooklyn gangs known as Wooo and Choo were indicted Wednesday in a sweeping crackdown prosecutors say covers nearly three years of gunfire across Brownsville public housing.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced the charges together, calling the investigation Operation Crossfire. The name came from the danger locals faced from stray bullets exchanged between the two crews. Investigators traced 36 shootings back to the summer of 2023, with 11 victims total. One of those victims died.
The scale of the collateral damage is staggering. One innocent bystander was shot while taking out the trash. On 12 separate occasions, bullets tore through doors and windows into occupied apartments.
“On 12 occasions, bullets went through doors or windows where people were residing in their apartments, with their families, with their children, and bullets enter their home,” Gonzalez said. “Let me say that again, 12 times, bullets entered into someone’s home. Sometimes they were on the fourth floor. The sixth floor, didn’t matter. They were not safe from this violence.”
The two gangs have been locked in a territorial war over several public housing developments spread across the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Prosecutors said the Wooo gang claims the Van Dyke Houses, Langston Hughes Houses, Noble Drew Ali Plaza, and Brownsville Houses as its base. The Choo crew controls turf at the Tilden Houses, Howard Houses, Marcus Garvey Village, Newport Gardens, and Riverdale Towers. The competing claims turned the blocks between those complexes into a shooting gallery for years.
Tisch didn’t soften her assessment of what that meant for residents. “Their generational rivalry over territory among various public housing developments across Brownsville has terrorized that neighborhood for years,” she said. “Their vicious campaign of retaliation and retribution waged with absolutely no regard for human life, turned every slight into a shootout. The broad daylight gun battles between these two gangs happened in playgrounds and parks on basketball courts and in subway” stations.
Gonzalez showed surveillance footage to journalists at the announcement. One clip, detailed in coverage by AMNY, captured the June 29, 2025 killing of 34-year-old Tahriq Thompson, shot by two gunmen who left him on the ground. Dead.
That footage made clear how open and brazen the violence had become. No attempt at concealment. No concern about cameras.
Another shooting captured in the investigation took place on April 22. A man identified as Ramos, among those arrested, allegedly opened fire near a Van Dyke Houses playground while young children were present. The children ran. Prosecutors say he didn’t stop.
These weren’t hidden crimes. The Wooo and Choo gangs built a public profile online, their feuds playing out on social media alongside the real-world gunfire in Brownsville. That digital footprint, prosecutors say, gave investigators a window into the rivalry that helped build the case. Thirty-six defendants now face charges as a result.
The breadth of the bust reflects how seriously city and state law enforcement treated the pattern. Operation Crossfire pulled together surveillance footage, ballistics, and witness accounts to map the shooting war across multiple housing projects, connecting individual incidents to a broader campaign of retaliatory violence.
For Brownsville residents, the arrests close a chapter that cost them years of safety and peace. The neighborhood absorbed bullet after bullet, round after round punching through apartment walls, scattering kids off basketball courts, and turning the act of taking out the trash into something that could get you shot. Eleven people were hit across those 36 documented shootings. One didn’t survive.
Gonzalez and Tisch both framed the operation as a direct defense of communities that couldn’t wait for the gangs to settle their grudge on their own terms. The 36 indictments cover defendants tied to both crews, cutting into the Wooo and Choo rosters simultaneously rather than pushing the violence to one side.
Brownsville isn’t a neighborhood that gets a lot of slack from the city when it comes to crime statistics, and the pressure on prosecutors to deliver results there is real. Wednesday’s announcement gave DA Gonzalez a chance to show that Operation Crossfire had delivered. The case now moves toward arraignment and trial for dozens of defendants across both gangs.