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The rise in shootings has prompted calls for investment in community-driven violence prevention programs, which experts say are key to addressing the crisis.Ĭounselors working for violence prevention programs - who have often experienced street violence themselves - meet with young people who may find themselves involved in shootings, either as a victim or aggressor. Almost half were Black in a county where just 7 percent of residents describe themselves as Black. Eighty percent of the victims were people of color. The demographic data collected by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office paints a stark picture: 85 percent of the victims from the first half of this year were men or boys, and 46 percent were younger than 25. What’s clear, though, is that the pain is disproportionately being felt by the region’s Black communities. “Crime trends, unfortunately, quite messy business,” Abt said. The violence shouldn’t be dismissed as insignificant, he said but it also shouldn’t be viewed as a “crime wave” or cause for panic. Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, notes that while the current trends are alarming, they’re still well below the historic highs of the 1980s and 1990s. Much of the violence stems from conflicts involving young men, though some is domestic violence, which has increased during the pandemic but typically affects older demographics. There’s no simple answer, but researchers and community members point to a combination of pandemic-induced social and economic stress, easy access to firearms and the closure of community institutions like schools. The violence has left many wondering why shootings are rising in the first place. King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg described this as an “unprecedented time of violence.” The analysis didn’t include suicides, which make up a majority of gun deaths, or people shot by police. ![]() Of those shootings, 42 were fatal - a 48 percent increase compared with recent years. In the first half of 2021, 196 people were shot. While the number of shootings in Seattle and King County remains low compared with other large American cities, the region has seen an increase in violence that mirrors the rise in other metropolitan areas. ![]() In 2020, more Americans died by gun violence than in any year in at least two decades. I’ve lost people before, but never this many back to back to back to back.” “It’s happening in such a short time span. “I feel like we’re saving so many people, but then it almost seems like a slap in the face when you see stuff like this happening,” Nabors said. But the death of friends like Taylor, who Nabors played basketball with almost every day growing up, adds devastating weight to the already difficult work. The peer mentorship done by Community Passageways and its contemporaries has been promoted as the region’s best tool to break the cycle of violence that has seen dozens of teens and young men killed during the past year.Īs a community ambassador, Nabors has helped pull young men out of the cycle, connecting them with employment and viable alternatives to incarceration. Nabors is a community ambassador with Community Passageways, one of a handful of Seattle mentorship organizations staffed almost exclusively by Black men and women close to the violence that is taking an outsized toll on the city’ Black community. Nabors, 27, went there to grieve for his friend, his fourth loss this summer during an ongoing spate of gun violence that has pushed murder rates to levels not seen in decades. 12, though, Taylor, a 22-year-old soon-to-be father, was dead, killed in a shooting. Both were trying to put their lives back together after run-ins with the justice system. Childhood friends, both grew up in South Seattle. ![]() DeShaun Nabors and Ezekiel Taylor were two young Seattle men with a lot in common.
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