Raleigh shootings, gun violence rose in 2021. Here’s what the city is doing about it.
Gun violence in Raleigh rose in 2020, as violent crime surged nationwide.
It got worse in 2021.
Homicides, non-fatal shootings, assaults with guns and armed robberies all increased, newly released statistics from the Raleigh Police Department show.
Experts blame a mix of factors seen across the United States: more guns in circulation, social and economic stress in the pandemic, damaged trust in law enforcement, and police staffing shortages.
Last year in Raleigh, 463 people were assaulted with a gun — 32% more than in 2020 and 62% more than in 2019.
Twenty-six people were fatally shot, the majority of the city’s 34 reported homicides.
Another 131 people were shot and survived, compared to 105 in 2020 and 99 in 2019.
The local trends mirror those of many other major and mid-size cities.
From 2020 to 2021, gun assaults rose by 8% across 12 U.S. cities analyzed by the Council on Criminal Justice. This includes cities with populations similar to Raleigh, such as Nashville, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Sacramento, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.
The figures are troubling, said Phil Cook, professor emeritus of public policy and economics at Duke University and a gun violence expert. As shootings go up, so too does the risk of homicides, he said.
“It’s just a matter of luck whether a shooting victim lives or dies,” he said. “It could be matter of an inch of where the bullet hits them.”
What’s driving gun violence?
There have already been four fatal shootings in Raleigh in 2022, including a 21-year-old man who died after four people were shot Monday night at the Wake Inn on New Bern Avenue.
In a January interview with The News & Observer, Police Chief Estella Patterson described the city’s increase in gun violence “modest,” given Raleigh’s population of roughly 467,000 people in 2020.
“Our challenge is to make sure that [the violent crime rate] doesn’t outpace the population growth,” said Patterson, who became chief last summer. “And in order to prevent that, you just have to be very laser-focused on strategies to prevent it from happening.”
This recent increase may reflect a need for more officers on the job — the department currently has roughly 100 vacancies out of 800 positions.
“Vacancies do have an impact on some of the crime-reduction and crime-prevention measures that I want to put in place,” Patterson said.
“It hurts the community in the sense of that I don’t have officers out in the community that I would like to have,” she explained. “We really are trying hard to rebuild our relationships with our community and with the public, and I’ve got to have officers to do that.”
Despite the staff shortage, “we’re still patrolling our areas that we need to,” Patterson said. “We’re answering our calls for service. Our priority calls for service are not suffering at all because of our vacancies. And we’ll continue to work so that we can reallocate resources and use them effectively.”
After a largely “hands-off approach” as COVID-19 spread in 2020 and early 2021, Raleigh police made more traffic stops last year, and confiscated more guns. by late November, police had confiscated at least 783 firearms, a 38% increase from 2020.
But more must be done, the chief said. Legislators need to pass stricter laws to keep guns out of the wrong people’s hands, and gun owners need to take responsibility and safely store their weapons.
“There’s certainly a relationship,” between gun availability and gun violence, said Cook. “Most of the guns that are used in a crime were acquired illegally one way or another, or were kept by somebody not legally entitled to get a gun.”
Who’s getting hurt?
Victims of gun violence in Raleigh have gotten younger, with a 55% increase in non-fatal shooting victims between the ages of 18 and 24 since 2020.
The pandemic has given young people greater access to guns and fewer activities, including in-person school, to keep them busy, Patterson said.
Patterson stopped short of saying Raleigh has a gang problem, but Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin said the topic has come up in her discussions with the chief.
“She’s indicated that there needs to be more focus on gang violence,” Baldwin said in an interview. “The chief has indicated that our gang prevention is going to be much more aggressive moving forward.”
But Baldwin said the issue is bigger than police alone can handle.
“The big thing is really looking at the issue of poverty, and how that plays into gun violence,” she said. “It plays into gang recruitment, how it plays into kids who don’t have role models.”
Housing affordability in Raleigh and the rest of the Triangle is a factor at play as well, Baldwin added.
What’s being done about it?
The city’s police force is taking a three-pronged approach to crime reduction under Patterson:
▪ Preventing violence through community policing and partnerships like a new community violence intervention initiative with the Raleigh-Apex NAACP chapter
▪ Using data and intelligence to identify and target violent crime hot spots and concentrating patrols there
▪ Partnering with federal law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute repeat offenders and suspects with violent records.
Gerald Givens Jr., president of the Raleigh-Apex NAACP, says the goal of partnering with the police is to organize a proactive and holistic approach to preventing gun violence.
“What we want to do is get ahead of (gun violence) as our city continues to grow,” he told The N&O.
Investing now will prevent having to spend much more on violence prevention in the future, as bigger cities currently do, he said.
The program, which is in its early stages, will work in phases: intervening in interpersonal and group conflicts; providing at-risk individuals and survivors of gun violence with mental health services like therapy; and connecting high-risk youth to jobs.
Although relations between many people of color and law enforcement have soured since 2020, Givens — a survivor of gun and gang violence from Detroit — says the NAACP wants to build trust between community members and law enforcement.
“I’ve had the opportunity to sit down and talk with some of young people that are involved in gang activity.” he said. “The number one thing that was talked about was that they wanted an opportunity and they wanted a chance. A lot of them felt that they didn’t have it. So the streets is where they go. We have to turn that around.”
Raleigh to raise police pay
The City Council will “do what we have to do to keep our community safe,” said Baldwin. That includes plans to raise police pay and provide recruitment incentives as the city works on the fiscal 2023 budget.
Having more officers on the job could improve community relations and have a “force multiplier” effect, said Patterson, in which Raleigh residents voluntarily help law enforcement police their communities.
Last month, the Durham City Council approved millions of dollars to raise police and firefighter pay.
Patterson said the Raleigh police will look to hire certified law enforcement officers from other municipalities and create a pipeline hiring program with interns and interested college students.
“The whole principle of community policing is harder to do when you face that shortage,” said Baldwin. “It’s so important for us to really treat this with urgency and get more recruits in, because we want to focus on community policing, working with the community, and that just improves policing altogether.”
This story was originally published February 4, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
