TITLE: Rural residents grapple with endemic gun violence
https://www.carolinacoastonline.com/regional/article_90e23ba0-7712-11ee-b532-ef6ba10ec74e.html
EXCERPT: Patro Porter’s death wasn’t an isolated incident. Phillips County, where Elaine is located, is home to about 15,000 people spread across 690 square miles [of rural Arkansas]. Data shows they’re at high risk of gun violence. From 2016 to 2020, the county had the country’s highest per capita rate of gun homicides, according to an analysis last year by the Center for American Progress, a policy research institute.
During three days in July, police responded to reports of four homicides in Helena-West Helena, the Phillips County seat. That might be a small number for a major city, but it has an outsize impact in a rural town, said Nick Wilson, senior director for gun violence prevention at the Center for American Progress.
Suicide rates in rural areas have long been higher than in cities. But nationwide, rural gun homicides have risen too, and, in some areas, outpaced their urban counterparts. From 2016 to 2020, 13 of the 20 counties with the highest gun homicide rates were in the rural South, according to the center’s study.
The deaths can devastate small communities. Rural areas often lack the resources and expertise needed to stem gun violence and medical facilities to care for the wounded.
More research is needed to determine what drives rural gun violence in the places it’s most prevalent, but the causes are similar to those in historically “redlined” urban neighborhoods, where Black people have been denied mortgages and other housing opportunities, said Daniel Webster, a distinguished scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Both types of areas have been starved of resources and opportunities, he said.
“These disadvantages are structural and driven by policy rather than naturally occurring,” he said. “The conditions that lead to structural racism also lead to higher rates of gun violence.” These are places that have lacked investment, where poverty is rampant, unemployment is high, schools are failing, and buildings are crumbling.
Phillips County has a harrowing history of racism. In 1919, Elaine was the site of one of the worst racial massacres in U.S. history. At least 200 Black residents were murdered by white residents and soldiers over a couple of days after a group of Black farmers met one late September evening to demand better payments for their cotton crops.
The descendants still deal with generational trauma, said Brian Mitchell, a historian who researched the massacre and is now director of research and interpretation at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Segregation continued, the mechanization of farming sent unemployment soaring, and poverty deepened.
Still, Ora Scaife, 40, remembers a “joyful” childhood in Elaine, where she attended middle and high school football and basketball games and looked forward to seeing store windows decorated for the holidays. “It was popping,” said Scaife, manager at the town’s Dollar General.
Today, Elaine’s shops and restaurants sit empty. Many houses are crumbling. Even the schools shut down because of declining enrollment — children are now bused 30 minutes to Marvell. The Dollar General employs both Patro Porter’s son and the sister of the man accused of shooting him, Scaife said.
TITLE: “It’s hell”: Surge of Texas kids dying from gun violence carves canyons of grief through families
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/30/gun-fatalities-texas-youths/
EXCERPT: Shane was one of the first Texas teens killed with a gun this year after he was shot Jan. 10 somewhere between a friend’s house and his family’s apartment in Baytown, a suburb east of Houston. Hamilton still doesn’t know why Shane was shot — or who pulled the trigger.
One hundred and seventy-three more youths in Texas died from gunshot wounds in the eight months that followed Shane’s death, according to state health data. Each death represents a growing, gruesome trend. In 2020, gunshots became the leading cause of death for Texas youths. The number of youths — those younger than 18 — killed by guns in Texas went up from around 100 a decade ago to nearly 300 in 2022.
TITLE: Can smart guns, drones, strong laws cut U.S. gun violence?
https://www.oakridger.com/story/news/local/2023/10/29/can-smart-guns-drones-strong-laws-cut-u-s-gun-violence/71340910007/
EXCERPT: [Retired family physician] Bill Culbert noted that the quartile of states with gun laws that have the strongest legislative strength score had 40% fewer gun deaths than the quartile of states with the weakest gun laws. The problem, he added, is that “if you have a state with great gun laws that is bordering a state with weak gun laws, you have an iron pipeline into the state with good laws.”
Culbert suggested that technology could also be used to identify the perpetrators of almost all homicides in the United States, another possible route to reducing gun violence. About 80% of U.S. murders in 2021 involved a firearm, according to the CDC.
"Only 52% of American homicides are solved,” he said. Using police work backed up by a highly integrated forensic system with extensive databases, he added, Finland has a homicide solve rate of 98%.
TITLE: One City’s Surprising Tactic to Reduce Gun Violence: Solving More Nonfatal Shootings
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/10/30/nonfatal-shootings-police-clearance-rates-denver
EXCERPT: In 2020, responding to an uptick in gun violence, the city’s police department adopted the uncontroversial but unusual approach of seriously trying to solve every nonfatal shooting. Officials created a new unit, the Firearm Assault Shoot Team, or FAST, devoted solely to the task.
Over the last three years, FAST has cleared hundreds of shootings, arresting suspects or issuing warrants for their capture at nearly triple the department’s previous rate for these violent crimes. The effort has shown that when detectives have the time, resources and commitment, they can resolve most shootings.
And it raises uncomfortable questions about why police departments across the rest of the country do not.
“The only difference between a nonfatal shooting and a homicide is luck,” said Paul Pazen, the former Denver police chief who launched FAST in 2020. “Policing shouldn’t come down to luck.”
Historically, Denver’s gun murder rate has been about average among large American cities. Minorities have borne a disproportionate share of the violence: An analysis by the Public Health Institute at Denver Health found that Black people in Denver were about five times as likely to be murdered with guns as White people between 2011 and 2015.
But the police department usually solved the homicides. In 2013, the U.S. Justice Department selected the city for a report on best practices for making homicide arrests. Like other high-performing homicide units, Denver’s was a single team of rigorously vetted officers who had undergone special training and worked intensively on a handful of cases at a time. (Ideally, a homicide investigator leads no more than three cases per year, according to the Justice Department report.)
Nonfatal shootings were not treated the same way, however. These crimes fell to officers in each of Denver’s six police districts, who were handling all manner of cases and upwards of 250 a year.
Pazen once asked an investigator why it was difficult to solve nonfatal shootings. “We can run pretty good on the case for about 48 hours,” he recalled the officer telling him, “but then more cases come in. And if I have trouble getting ahold of witnesses, if I have trouble getting ahold of the victim, then this case often gets pushed to the backburner.”
Uncooperative witnesses are a regular part of police work. But when given a choice between overcoming those hurdles and addressing a competing priority — a burglary ring, or a series of auto thefts — busy officers often set aside investigations of nonfatal shootings to focus on crimes where they felt they could make more of a difference.
“They'd walk away from these cases, citing the victim's refusal to cooperate,” recalled Matt Clark, who commands the Major Crimes Division. The department couldn’t even measure its performance investigating nonfatal shootings because it didn’t have a system for counting them, he recalled. In the department’s databases, nonfatal shootings were grouped with other aggravated assaults, be they committed with knives, vehicles or fists. Nonfatal shootings got lost in that pool of incidents, which was 50 times larger than that of homicides. In 2019, Denver analysts had to perform a tedious hand search of thousands of aggravated assault cases, flagging those involving firearms, to conclude the department had cleared by arrest just 1 in 6.
Philip Cook, a professor emeritus at Duke University and one of the country’s foremost economists of crime, said this is typical of police departments — and bad policy.
If the justice system aims to incarcerate those with a high likelihood of harming others, there are few people more important to detain than those who have shot and almost killed someone else. Particularly given that the victim of an unresolved shooting might be motivated to retaliate with violence of their own.
Inconsistent policing of gun violence also undermines any role the justice system plays as a deterrent, since evidence shows the certainty of punishment is more important than its severity for discouraging reoffending.
In a recent book he co-authored, Cook hypothesized that allowing shooters to act with impunity likely demoralizes their communities, erodes trust that law enforcement is capable of keeping the peace, and makes it harder for officers to win the cooperation of witnesses.
“Once you accept the idea of the ‘almost-cide,’” Cook said, “from a prevention point-of-view, solving a nonfatal shooting is every bit as good as solving a fatal shooting.”