SALEM, Oregon — The City of Salem has seen a rise in violent crime over the past ten years, and gun violence has doubled in the last five.
In response, the mayor and police chief teamed up to start the Community Violence Reduction Initiative. The initiative aims to address the rise in violent crime by bringing together leaders and members of the community to develop strategies to deal with the problem.
“It’s a focused group of individuals who are at risk of being involved in this type of behavior. We really want to start a community conversation on disrupting that behavior, and ultimately, my goal is to prevent it,” said Mayor Chris Hoy.
Hoy is hoping that connecting youth to community programs and positive groups will help reduce their involvement in gun crimes.
“When we don’t fill the void with something positive, something negative can unfortunately take hold, and that’s unfortunately what we are seeing,” he said.
The city held its first of several related community outreach meetings Wednesday night at the East Salem Community Center. They plan to hold more of these events this year with the hopes of developing a community-focused strategy that is specific to Salem to help deal with the problem of violent crime and youth gun violence. Salem resident Almaluma Campos attended the meeting. She said her son was recently assaulted while having lunch.
"When he walked outside the restaurant, some kid hit him and we took him to the hospital," said Campos. "We're afraid when we go outside because a lot of people-- you never know who's who."
At the meeting, City leaders discussed a recent study they commissioned to track violence in the city. It showed the number of shootings in Salem has doubled in the last 5 years and violent crime has risen by 42% since 2014.
“One of the troubling trends within the report you can see is that youth gun crime is increasing, mostly on the offender side. More and more juveniles are actually committing shootings in Salem, and that’s trending up,” said Police Chief Trevor Womack.
Womack is modeling this community approach to solving gun violence on successful strategies used by other cities.
“We know just from evidence what works in other cities that it takes a whole of community approach, so without the communities voice in this process, we can’t be as effective as we possibly could,” he said.
The study also showed most of the city's shootings are happen within a 5-square mile area in Northeast Salem. Most of the victims are young men between the ages of 18 and 34, and about half are Latino. Community outreach experts hope identifying potential victims will help protect them.
"We get a chance to have a conversation with people and say you're at an incredibly high risk to be shot," said peace advocate, Ben McBride. "We want to figure out how to come up with a very custom strategy to make sure we save your life, the lives of your children and make sure you live a wonderful and fruitful life."