Homicides in Sacramento County spiking despite COVID lockdowns. What’s behind the rise?
A 9-year-old girl hit by stray gunfire at a Del Paso Heights park. A 27-year-old father randomly targeted as he waited in line at an Arden Arcade market with his 4-year-old daughter at his side. Two teenage brothers killed while they and others shopped on Black Friday at Arden Fair mall.
Even as the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of society, deadly crime in Sacramento County spiked in 2020.
These are just a few of the victims of violent crime in Sacramento County as the number of homicides increased this year, even as the COVID-19 pandemic forced various phases of shutdowns that closed schools and businesses to prevent further spread of the coronavirus.
People were directed to stay home as much as possible, wear mask to protect everyone from the virus and at the very least maintain a safe distance from each other. Yet, the number of homicides across Sacramento County has climbed 23% to 114 so far this year compared with 92 in 2019, according to the Coroner’s Office.
The number of people younger than 18 who’ve been killed by homicide in the county also increased to six from three a year ago. Of those children who died this year, three of them were 17 years old and the others were under 10 years old, according to the Coroner’s Office.
In the city of Sacramento alone, the number of homicides jumped 21% to 41 this year from 34, according to police. The number of homicides within the city reached its highest level since 2015. The number of homicide victims younger than 18 in the city increased from not having any in the past two years to four this year.
Sacramento Police Chief Daniel Hahn said there are a lot of factors that led to the homicide increase this year. He said gang violence has always been a problem in the region, and it continued this year. But there was also domestic violence that ended in deaths, he said, along with people simply choosing to solve their disagreements with violence.
Adding to that, the COVID-19 pandemic played a role in the homicide spike this year, he said. Coronavirus restrictions took a lot away from youths and others, such as sports and school activities, according to Hahn.
“It’s kind of like a perfect storm,” Hahn told The Sacramento Bee. “Anytime something like this goes up, there’s no one simple answer or reason why it’s going up.”
The homicide increase this year is the result of the COVID-19 pandemic revealing how fragile the “broken system” of poverty and neglected communities is, said Berry Accius, a Sacramento community activist who works on violence prevention and intervention with youths.
He told The Bee that it was a “combustible situation” in the capital region before the pandemic, and community groups have worked tirelessly to reach young people and steer them away from violence. But coronavirus restrictions and declining funding for community efforts turned the region into the “wild, Wild West all over again,” Accius said.
Two years without a single juveniles dying from homicide was a significant success for Sacramento — involving a lot of hard work and some luck, Hahn said. He doesn’t recall it ever happening before in his 37-year law enforcement career.
“Now, maybe it has. I don’t remember it. Definitely in no time recently,” he said.
Accius, founder of Voice of the Youth, said that the pandemic created a lot of idle time for young people in distance learning from home, separated from sports and other after-school activities typically available. That left a lot of youth with much more time on social media, where even some some of the well-behaved young people were creating fake “volatile personas” that led to beefs and eventually violent confrontations, Accius said.
He said young people not readily prepared with the skills and guidance of conflict resolution this year have become more willing to embrace the “notoriety and death” that comes with violence.
Nationwide violence epidemic
Mental health also is a major factor in this year’s surge in violence, Accius said. Depression has set in for many as the pandemic persists. He also said the nationwide epidemic of gun violence has desensitized young people to normalize murder.
In the first half of this year, murders and aggravated assaults increased in large cities in California and across the nation from the same time period last year 2019 to 2020, the FBI data show. Those increases were offset by a decline in the number of other violent crimes, such as robberies and rapes.
The number of aggravated assaults increased in Elk Grove, Roseville and Sacramento, this region’s three largest cities, by a combined total of 252, or 23%, according to the FBI data.
Law enforcement officials said the number of shootings surged in Sacramento earlier this year. Between May 22 and June 22, detectives with the Sacramento Police Department and Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office investigated 60 shootings, more than twice the number they investigated over the same span last year.
These increases came after the violent crime rate in the four-county Sacramento region fell to its lowest level in at least 35 years during 2019, according to the California Department of Justice. Law enforcement agencies in Sacramento, Yolo, Placer and El Dorado counties reported 8,322 violent crimes in 2019, for a rate of 354 crimes per 100,000 residents. That was a decline of 6% from 2018 and 17% from 2014.
Over four days in early October, six shootings in the Sacramento area killed five people and injured several others. Among those victims were two children: Makaylah Brent, 9, who was killed, and a 6-year-old girl who was injured after they were struck by stray gunfire on a Saturday afternoon at Del Paso Heights’ Mama Marks Park.
Laise Burton Hands has been charged with murder in Makaylah’s death in the drive-by shooting at Mama Marks Park. Hands also faces three counts of attempted murder for the shooting that injured the 6-year-old girl and two adults, according to a criminal complaint filed in Sacramento Superior Court.
On the same afternoon of the Mama Marks Park shooting, a man shot three people before turning the gun on himself at the East Market & Restaurant-Sharq in Arden Arcade.
Abdul Mobin Andishmand, 19, and Shujauddin Omarkheil, 27, were both students at American River College in Sacramento and refugees from Afghanistan seeking a better life with their families in the United States when they were killed at the El Camino Avenue market.
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office has said Hassibullah Shams Hassib, 33, opened fire on the three victims at the market. He died at the scene of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Homicide spike a setback from previous success
Hahn said a lot of juvenile homicides don’t have anything to do with gangs; they can be the result of child abuse or neglect. And the community has provided a lot of support and counseling, which led to zero juvenile homicides the past two years, he said.
“We’ve had other years where more juveniles have been killed, so it’s not like it’s unprecedented,” Hahn said. “But it’s definitely a different direction than where we had gone for the last two years.”
Another factor in this year’s spike in homicides was that many of those who worked with young people to keep them away from criminal activity were either not able to work as closely with youth or not at all this year because of pandemic restrictions, Hahn said.
Most gang shootings are brazen, Hahn said, whether it’s drive-by shooting at a house or another car. But he also said there are other violent crimes committed simply because someone was willing to act out violently, even in a crowded mall.
“Obviously, it’s not every day we have a shooting in the mall, so that one is exceptionally brazen,” Hahn said. “Again, when we have people that are willing ... to commit violence like that, it’s just a matter of time when they are in a spot where that opportunity is there.”
Setbacks and opportunities
Hahn was speaking of the shooting deaths of Dewayne James Jr., 19, and his brother Sa’Quan Reed-James, 17, who were shopping at Arden Fair mall the day after Thanksgiving, when gunfire erupted.
Video footage of the mall shooting reviewed by The Bee showed members of two groups of young men, one member in each group armed with a handgun, who fired at each other as bystanders ran for their lives about 6 p.m. Prosecutors charged Damario Laron Beck, 18, with two counts of murder in the mall shooting.
Hahn said the mall shooting is just another example of heartbreak in the aftermath of gun violence. In this case, the police chief said one family is dealing with the grief of losing two teenage sons during the holiday season while another family is missing their teenage son who sits in a jail cell awaiting prosecution.
Accius said the shooting is a clear example of how some young people quickly resort to violence, even in a crowded mall with so many security cameras around.
This year’s homicide spike is not as high as several years before in Sacramento, when funerals and vigils were even more common in neighborhoods such as Oak Park, Del Paso Heights and south Sacramento, Accius said. And the city has improved in the past two years.
“We’ve seen when it was bad. We’ve been here before,” Accius said about Sacramento community advocates. “That means that what we were doing had started to work.”
Community groups such as the Black Child Legacy Campaign and Advance Peace had made important strides in Sacramento in prevention and intervention, which is much more than youth mentorship, Accius said. They negotiated in these communities for peaceful solutions to disputes among young people or work intensely with those who could some become a shooter, he said.
And right now is not the time to pull investment away from these successful community efforts, Accius said. Increasing economic opportunities is the answer, he said, not more police officers on the street.
“You can’t continue to police yourself out of this situation,” Accius said. “If you can get a gun quicker than you can get opportunity or employment, what is that telling you?”
Mervin Brookins, CEO of Brother to Brother, a community organization based in Del Paso Heights, said right now is the time to reinvest in the community programs and groups focused on intervention.
He told The Bee the declining homicide rate in previous years was proof those anti-violence efforts were successful. But he said those efforts did not succeed overnight, it took years of hard work to intervene with young people and thwart violent outbreaks. Brookins believes local officials need to commit to these long-term solutions with more funding for community efforts.
“We already know how to stop it. We already know how to prevent this type of violence from happening,” Brookins said.
Brookins agrees that COVID-19 restrictions, intended to protect everyone and prevent further spread of the virus, had an unintended consequence. Those restrictions kept more young people at home and gave them more time to gravitate toward “negative” attitudes on social media and get caught-up in “beefs,” he said.
The restrictions also made it difficult for community groups to have real interactions with troubled youths this year, Brookins said. But he believes it’s necessary for community groups, such as Brother to Brother, to have strong working relationships with police to make these intervention efforts successful.
“The only way it’s going to work if if we’re all working together,” Brookins said.
Police role in quelling deadly violence
Hahn said the Sacramento Police Department has a huge role in quelling deadly violence in getting guns out of the hands of people who commit crimes, preventing retaliatory shootings, increasing patrols, holding criminals accountable and working with communities to know what violence might be coming.
“But again, that’s kind of the short-term solution, that’s kind of the Band-Aid, that’s kind of ‘Let’s not have a shooting tomorrow night,’” Hahn said.
He said it would be a mistake to say that policing efforts are the main solution or the only one. Hahn suggested not enough time is spent on dealing with the root of violent crime where it has originated for decades. Opportunities in education and elsewhere, he said, are disproportionate across the region.
“We can change the laws and lock more people up. We can change the law and let more people out,” Hahn said. “Until we really start getting at the root, we will go up and down (in homicides) based on enforcement preventative measures. But we’ll never go down to where we could be until we ensure that all of our communities have equal opportunities.”
This story was originally published December 17, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
