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Homicides spike in new Durham crime report out Thursday. Here's what it shows.

News & Observer - 2/24/2022

Feb. 24—Durham saw a possible record number of homicides last year, even as reported shootings declined, according to a report that Police Chief Patrice Andrews will present to the City Council on Thursday.

The city saw 50 homicides in 2021, up from 37 the year before, and the most since at least 1995, when the police department began keeping electronic records.

That meant Durham saw a 35% increase in homicides, as total shootings declined by 18% and overall violent crime dropped by roughly 11%, according to the report.

Thursday's report comes after three fatal shootings last weekend, killings that will not be reflected in the 2021 annual report.

Last year's increase in homicides was consistent with the nation as a whole, said Ronald Wright, a criminal justice scholar and professor at Wake Forest Law School.

"The homicide increase is widespread and severe. It's happening all over the place," he said in an interview with The News & Observer.

"This is not a fluke or a statistical mirage," Wright continued. "This is something really happening."

The 2021 spike in homicides far outpaced a smaller increase in overall violent crime in many cities.

Christopher Herrmann, a former New York City Police Department analyst and a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said Durham's decrease in overall shootings appeared to be "an outlier."

"Most cities maintained the much higher shooting levels that they experienced in 2020," he said.

In Durham, there were 795 incidents in which shots were fired in 2021, with 280 people shot. That was down from 966 shooting incidents and 318 people shot the year before.

To Wright, the discrepancy between the homicide increase and overall shooting decrease could come down to chance: more bullets fatally hitting their target.

"When you're talking about 50 cases, chance can have something to do with that," he said, adding more data would be needed to understand the numbers.

When asked about gun violence trends, both Wright and Herrmann pointed to the continued stress of the COVID-19 pandemic and strained police-community relations in the wake of George Floyd's murder by Minneapolis police officers.

Wright added that a high number of guns circulating in the community could also be driving homicides.

"More guns floating around mean more use of guns, and therefore more shootings and deaths," he said.

'A community effort'

At a Durham City Council meeting Monday night, Mayor Elaine O'Neal said she would not speak about work that she and others are doing to address gun violence in the city.

"That is not a space that I will speak into publicly, because there's a lack of trust between the government and folk that I'm dealing with, and I can't compromise this trust-building relationship," she said.

"But this is a community effort," said O'Neal, a former District Court judge. "It's not going to be solved any way other than addressing basic housing needs and basic job needs."

"There are a lot of hurting people who have no trust in the government or its response to their very basic needs," she added.

In an interview with The N&O, Durham County District Attorney Satana Deberry said disinvestment in housing and small businesses has left the poorest communities vulnerable.

"As Durham is prospering, the wealth gap is larger," she said. "And so the people here who are poor, are much poorer, and have a lot less access to resources than they would have had 20, 30, 50 years ago."

Deberry, who led the N.C. Housing Coalition before becoming DA, said part of reducing crime means investing in families and children who are struggling economically, academically or in their mental or physical health, while also addressing larger issues like housing instability.

"We have here in Durham some public health approaches to gun violence, but those things take time to work," she said. "And the cyclical nature of violence means that once people's fear is ramped up about gun violence, those long-term solutions get less investment."

Deberry said those in the criminal legal system in Durham have been exploring other ways to prevent killings.

Historically, law enforcement agencies around the country have focused their investigative efforts on homicides, she said.

"Those cases are never closed. They will stay open forever, as long as an investigator is willing to work on those cases," she said. "[Non-fatal] shootings, that doesn't happen."

But while one of the best predictors for future homicide victims is whether someone has already been shot, Deberry said those cases can be difficult to solve.

"We've had instances where investigators have gone to visit a shooting victim in the hospital and ask them who shot them, and they will deny being shot," she said. "If we investigated shootings the way that we investigated homicides, we might see some of that change — because we would know what was happening before somebody was dead."

Police solved more crimes than in 2020

For all listed crime categories except rape and larceny, the Durham Police Department solved a higher percentage of cases in 2021 than in 2020, according to the crime report.

In 2021, Durham officers cleared 48% of homicides, up from 32% the year before, the report states. In 2019, however, the department solved 68% of killings, city officials previously told The N&O.

Cases are typically cleared by an arrest, but some cases can be exceptionally cleared for other reasons, such as when an offender dies or is arrested in another jurisdiction.

Clearance rates for rapes fell from 32% in 2020 to 23% in 2021.

For overall violent crimes, the department solved 36% of cases in 2021, up from 23% the year before.

The report did not include clearance rates for overall shootings or non-fatal shootings. When that data was requested by The N&O, Durham police said its Crime Analysis Unit "does not have clearance rates prepared for subcategories of shootings."

Aggravated assaults, which include shootings, had a clearance rate of 38% in 2021, up from 24% in 2020 and 32% in 2019.

In 2020, the Federal Bureau of Investigations reported that cities of Durham's size solved on average roughly 49% of homicides, 24% of rapes, 37% of aggravated assaults and 33% of overall violent crimes.

At a quarterly crime report in December, Andrews attributed below-average clearance rates for homicides and sexual assaults in part to staffing issues and the number of crimes occurring in the city, The N&O reported.

Do more police officers mean fewer crimes?

As of Dec. 31, there were 95 vacancies out of 662 positions at the Durham Police Department.

Of those, 81 vacancies were among the 537 allocated sworn officer positions — a rate of about 15%.

But Wright said decreasing violent crime in a community is not as simple as filling vacancies or providing more resources to law enforcement agencies.

"If you were to increase a police force by 25% — just a big hiring surge in the police department — what effects would you expect to see based on the research?" he said. "The answer would be several effects at once, some of them more immediate, some of them longer term."

In the short term, Wright said there may be a downturn in crime, as a "bigger, more visible police presence tends to be associated with fewer crimes" in public.

But longer term, he said the opposite may occur, as a community could see "more low level arrests" that harm people's job prospects and abilities to find productive roles in society.

"You end up sometimes producing more long-term crime, if you get more people involved in the criminal legal system earlier in their lives," he said.

New hires can also harm community relationships if they aren't trained well, which can hurt a department's ability to solve crimes as witnesses become less likely to come forward, he added.

Wright said research points to exploring other options to prevent crime, like Durham's Bull City United, a team of violence interrupters that uses a public health approach to prevent and contain gun violence before it spreads.

"I don't think we have a definitive answer yet, but there's some promising signs there," he said.

Herrmann stressed that communities must address larger socioeconomic issues to reduce violent crime in the long term.

"This is not a problem that the communities or the police are going to be able to arrest their way out of," he said. "A lot of communities are going to need to start investing more in nonprofit gang violence initiatives or gun violence interrupters."

But he added those initiatives will need time and funding to enact change.

Some neighborhoods face high rates of violent crime

At a meeting this month, Durham County'sGang Reduction Strategy Steering Committee pointed to 12 census tracts in Durham that were seeing high rates of violent crime.

Most were in central and eastern Durham, with some south of N.C. 147 and others bisected by N.C. 98. Two were in northern Durham.

Those areas, which experienced rates of aggravated assaults and homicides as much as 7.5 times higher than the city as a whole, also have high rates of childhood and overall poverty, lower rates of educational opportunity and lower access to resources and job opportunities.

Herrmann said shootings and homicides typically occur on less than 5% of the streets in a city. "A very small percent of that 5%" faces the majority of crime, he added.

"Sadly those are the people who can't move out," he said. "Those are the people who are trapped."

This story was originally published February 24, 20225:30 AM.

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