Raheem Murray and two of his friends were deep in conversation on a walkway along 3rd Street in the residential area of Southeast DC. It was the second of February last year, a sunny and beautiful day.
All seemed well for the 26-year-old and his buddies until two men emerged from a grey sedan and started shooting at them.
Shocked by the sudden sound of gunfire, the three boys stumbled upon each while running towards safety. One of them almost took down a small boy running from the chaos alongside a guardian who had instinctively fled with another young child in his hands.
Unfortunately, Murray was not quick enough and was cornered by one of the gunmen who fired furiously at him even as he lay on the ground writhing with pain. Then the assailant moved closer and put one more bullet through the young man’s head, execution style, before dashing back to their car for a quick getaway.
Murray’s murder was one of the coldest, vicious and most brazen episodes of gun violence in DC last year. The events captured on a video served as a reminder of how unsafe District of Columbia (DC) neighborhoods had become.
“I have never seen anything like that,” said Dennis Farres, Murray’s dad and retired Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officer, who served for 29 years, during an interview shortly after his son’s death.
Murray’s death was one of the 11 homicides that took place over that month, adding to the thousands of lives lost in DC to senseless killings over the last few decades. His death and tens more that followed in 2020, accelerating the city’s pace towards clinching the dubious honor of being the most dangerous city in America.
DC had a 19 percent increase in homicide rate last year when compared to 2019, a 15-year high, according to data from the Metropolitan department.
Gun-fueled homicides
The cases of homicide were propelled by guns. Data from DC’s police department shows that 889 persons succumbed to gunshot wounds over the last decade. This means nine out of ten victims of homicides since 2010 are due to gun-violence.
A summary of DC gun-violence victims also showed that young Black American male were disproportionately affected. And 10 times more likely than white Americans to die by gun homicide, according to the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR).
Already, 63 people have been killed this year through gun violence in DC. Last month alone, all but one of the 12 victims of homicide were killed in shootings. This is with the exception of the attempted carjacking incident by two teenage girls on the 1200 block of Van Street, SE. which left Mohammad Anwar, a taxi driver, dead. Anwar, who was hanging on the door, was killed after the girls hit a post at a high speed as they sped-off.
This month 18 more had been killed by the end of last week. The victims are also young, with the average age being 29 years.
The increased murders across DC also put its capital, Washington, amongst cities like New York and Chicago that saw an upsurge in the rate of homicides during the year. Homicide rate according to the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice report spiked in 29 major cities in the US and slowed down in only four of them.
Slowed community-based interventions
Studies predict that gun-violence has been accelerated by a halt of community-based interventions due to the pandemic.
“The pandemic has strained the institutions charged with responding to violent offenses, including police agencies, courts, hospitals, emergency medical services, and community-based groups that productively engage at-risk individuals,” said a 2021 report by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice.
“Most evidence-informed violence reduction efforts depend heavily on proactive outreach to at-risk people and places, and such outreach has been largely curtailed by the ongoing risk of infection.”
Community based programs in DC include Pathways Program, an employment program that provides job opportunities to youths who are at the highest risk of being involved in violent crimes. The program which is under the mayor's Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement refers to individuals for job placements.
However, ending crime is not as easy as it seems.
“It takes more than just getting a person a job. You want to provide them with pathways to stability. This means even working on their housing concerns, child care, mental health, it is a whole pot of interventions and support and resources that are needed.” Javon Gregoire, Deputy Director, READI Chicago, a response to gun-violence program, while speaking during a recent talk on community-based approach to dealing with crime.
As community interventions on gun-violence reduction became hampered by the pandemic, experts argue that the responsibility of reducing gun-violence in DC and like many cities across the US had aborted because it was left to the law enforcers.
Ending gun-violence across the US, said David Muhammed, NICJR Executive Director, cannot be solely left in the hands of the police. He called for a more intentional approach.
“This is not the work of the police-chiefs- they should only play a small percentage on reducing gun-violence. There has to be someone highly competent whose work is to deal with gun violence in the cities and coordinate with all the community-based folks,” he said.
Fernando Rejon, Executive Director, Urban Peace Institute, echoing his words also said that to generate safety there has to be more than an imposition of laws. He called for sustained community involvement.
Muhammed said application of data-driven and focused approaches in every city could work with the commitment from local administrators.
“And so, I want to ask city mayors, city administrators, policy makers, is gun violence a priority for you and can you prove it. Is there anybody’s full-time job in your administration to reduce gun-violence?”
