I didn’t feel anything at first but 10 seconds later I could hardly breathe,” King said as he sat on a street after three nights in the hospital. “He turned around and pulled a pistol out and I didn’t see it. Jeremiah King, who is transitioning out of homelessness, was shot while trying to protect a friend who was being attacked just a short walk from the city’s business district. LOS ANGELES TIMES NEWSRACK DRIVERLast month, an Uber driver was seriously wounded and his passenger killed in an unsolved shooting. In Portland, gun violence once largely limited to historically marginalized neighborhoods has spread to the downtown core and more affluent areas. “There’s a lot of evidence that something bigger is going on than the social justice protests that happened, and it’s probably more than one thing,” said Struhl, whose center has worked with Baltimore, Philadelphia and Oakland to reduce gun violence. “The problem is you see cities where they didn’t do any of those things where crime also went up and you’ll see rural areas where crime also went up as well,” said Ben Struhl, executive director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Violent crime has increased in red and blue communities alike, regardless of their approach. Gun sales also spiked during the pandemic.Įxperts say widely cited theories that violent crime is worse in places that changed policing tactics in the wake of protests over Floyd’s murder don’t bear out. It’s unclear what’s driving the surge, but COVID-19 created huge social disruption and upended government and community support systems. While nonviolent crime decreased during the pandemic, the murder rate increased nearly 30% in 2020 and the rate of assaults went up 10%, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The city has seen nearly 800 shootings this year. A report completed for the city last month by the California Partnership for Safe Communities found it had the largest homicide rate increase among similarly sized cities and 75% of homicides in 2020 were by gun. Portland logged a record 89 homicides last year - roughly three times its historical average - and is on pace to top that this year after already tallying more than 50. Are we going to be able to recruit enough people to serve our cities?” asked Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell, whose force has lost 237 sworn officers through retirements or resignations since 2020. “For me, I wonder what the profession is going to be 20 years from now if we’re having these challenges on a nationwide scale. Departments all over are down and recruitment has been difficult.” “This isn’t just an issue in Philadelphia. “We’re getting more calls for service and there are fewer people to answer them,” said Philadelphia Police spokesperson Eric Gripp, whose department has been rotating employees from specialty units for short assignments to increase patrols. Many have shifted veteran officers to patrol, breaking up specialized teams built over decades in order to keep up with 911 calls. It’s insane.”įrom Philadelphia to Portland to Los Angeles, killings and gun violence are rising at the same time officers worn out by the pandemic and disillusioned over the calls to divest from policing that followed George Floyd’s murder are quitting or retiring faster than they can be replaced.ĭepartments are scrambling to recruit in a tight labor market and also rethinking what services they can provide and what role police should play in their communities. “We’re not dissatisfied with the Police Bureau because I think they’re doing the best they can. “To us, it’s not a cold case,” said George Spaulding, who has his son’s signature tattooed on his arm. The detective assigned to investigate the death of Spaulding - a chiropractic assistant who didn’t do drugs, wasn’t in a gang and lived close to the house where he was born - left in 2020 in a wave of retirements and the detective assigned to it now is swamped with fresh cases after Portland’s homicide rate surged 207% since 2019. Five years after Brian Spaulding’s parents found him fatally shot in the home he shared with roommates, his slaying remains a mystery that seems increasingly unlikely to be solved as Portland, Ore., police confront a spike in killings and more than 100 officer vacancies.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |