New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
LOSS, HEARTACHE
Young people often victims of city homicides
Roughly 10 percent of those killed by guns in Connecticut over the past decade were people 25 and younger in the state’s three largest cities.
From 2010 to mid-2020, 2,056 people died by guns in the state, with causes ranging from accidents to homicide or death by suicide, data from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner shows. Homicides accounted for 850 of the deaths in the roughly 10-year period.
Some of the deaths are unclassified, either pending or undetermined.
Of the overall total, 431 people ages 25 and under — roughly 21 percent — died by guns. Of those, 201 were victims of homicides in the state’s largest cities: 63 in Bridgeport, 65 in New Haven and 73 in Hartford.
Young people being killed with guns in cities is not a new problem — one reason why advocates like the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance say new solutions are needed to address the issue.
“It’s sad people feel like they always need a gun on them to survive. A statement like that is something we hear a lot,” said Iliana Pujols, director of community connections at CJJA, recalling conversations she’s had with youths living in cities. “At this point guns is all we know.”
Too often, experts said, it’s difficult to engage young people in programs designed to keep them out of trouble and consequences for youth violence often lack the impact needed to prevent future trouble.
Not just a local problem
The numbers for Connecticut reflect national trends, according to Marc Zimmerman, a professor of public health at the University of Michigan whose work focuses on youth violence prevention. He said data is pretty hard to come by.
“We don’t know a whole lot, but what we do know is homicides are more likely in urban settings, and suicides are more likely in rural settings,” he said.
Drilling down into all the reasons why and how gun violence is killing young people hasn’t yet happened. Much of the research has looked at risk factors among individuals without looking at the issue from a wider lens.
“One of the problems is there’s been such a dearth of research and funding for that research that we don’t know a lot about it,” Zimmerman said. “There’s so much more that we don’t know.”
In New Haven, where there have been four fatal shootings among individuals ages 25 and younger so far this year, Sgt. Bertram Ettienne, who is in charge of the Investigative Services Division, said there are a variety of factors that lead to escalating youth conflict, including social media.
“They use social media for everything they do,” Ettienne said. “That’s become the new norm. So now you have these social media beefs. And in some cases, it results in acts of violence in the streets.”
He said while social media can be used as a catalyst in these conflicts between the younger populations, sometimes leading to shootings, it can also be a resource for investigators.
In Bridgeport, a photo posted to social media the night 12-yearold Clinton Howell was gunned down walking near his Bridgeport home might have led to the shooter that killed him.
That December 2019 night,
Howell’s cousin posted a photo of a street sign and a local teen with an ongoing dispute with the cousin took the photo as a challenge and drove to the area, eventually taking a gun and firing, police said. Howell was killed; his cousin was not hit. The shooter, 18, and three others, ages 16, 14 and 12, were charged with Howell’s death.
Police said the teenagers had never met the members of a supposed rival gang they believed Howell’s cousin belonged to and they had only traded insults on Facebook and Snapchat. Later, the teens said they did not know Howell was not a member and was only 12 years old.
Digging deeper
Regional Youth Adult Social Action Partnership is a local organization helping with community violence prevention, gambling/ substance use education, juvenile justice reform and more in the greater Bridgeport area. RYASAP’s Executive Director Marc Donald said officials need to look for the deeper root to these incidents.
“All behavior has meaning,” Donald said. “Do they have a gun because they fear for their safety? Do they have a gun because they’re intending to go after victims for retaliation?”
He said issues behind youth involvement in gun violence go far beyond what’s on the surface.
“The issues go much deeper,” Donald said. “We know it is also poverty-based and rooted in systemic racism.”
Pujols said a number of programs addressing things like housing and food security and education have been shown to work at alleviating those root cause issues.
But the existence of such programs, when they are put in place, is only a first step. Getting young people in cities to engage with them is another.
“People don’t rely or trust the system’s resources because they don’t have any reason to trust the system at all,” she said.
“The only way to get resources to work is to get credible messages out to young people in the community working directly with community members,” Pujols said. “People feel so much more comfortable talking to someone they can relate to.”
Beyond the ground-level work, she said the state should be more visionary in its thinking with respect to criminal justice — and pointed to a myriad of juvenile justice reforms that has led to drastic drops in youth prison populations as evidence.
Now it’s time to think even bigger picture, she said.
“What does it look like to build something other than a prison or a jail for someone who commits a serious crime?” Pujols said.
Donald said his organization has developed a task force focusing on fatal and non-fatal gunfire in Bridgeport and beyond to develop a database, which would further help recognize and track patterns over the years.
In terms of Bridgeport, Donald echoed what law enforcement officials have been saying for years: that a significant amount of the gun violence in the city can be attributed to small groups, typically based around specific neighborhoods.
In New Haven, Ettienne said there are some gangs still around from decades ago — remnants of groups like the Latin Kings, Bloods and Crips — but most are “pop-up gangs.”
“A group pops up and will say, for example, they’re a certain set of Bloods,” Ettienne said. “But they’re not really official, for lack of a better word. They’ll just call themselves part of that group or that gang. There’s really no organization. There’s really no reasoning behind their group.”
The crimes seem senseless because they are, Zimmerman said.
He pointed to research that shows the rational part of the brain isn’t fully developed until around the age of 25.
“We say ‘What were they thinking?’” he said. “The answer is they weren’t, because all the synapses weren’t firing in the high portions of their brains.”
Making guns safer
Zimmerman said gun violence could also be reduced by making guns safer, a somewhat counterintuitive notion for a lethal weapon.
He likened the issue to the evolution in motor vehicle safety.
“If we think about the car industry and car deaths and how well we have done in reducing car injury and deaths, it took billions of dollars over many years, and now cars are safer,” he said.
“If you make the parallel to guns, could we make guns safer?” Zimmerman said, naming biometric trigger locks as one example. “There’s limitations but the bottom line is we haven’t spent the same kind of effort.”
He hesitated to place blame, saying that’s counterproductive.
“The bottom line is guns are part of American culture and they’re not going away anytime soon,” Zimmerman said. “We’re not going to get rid of the 330 million or so guns that exist in the U.S. So how do we figure out making them safer?”
Donald said RYASAP has heard from law enforcement officers that they feel “handcuffed” by the laws and prosecutors when it comes to juvenile offenders.
“They’re catching a teen with a gun, they get a citation and they’re back out in the community right away without some kind of deeper assessment,” Donald said.
Ettienne said officers in New Haven struggle with this, adding that while some offenders will get community service or house arrest after getting taken into custody for a crime, “there’s really no real consequence.”
Police in Bridgeport have preached trouble with trying to deal with repeat youth offenders for years, citing a possible need for changes to the law.
“The answer more times than not is there’s not much we can do with them,” Ettienne said. “That shouldn’t be the answer. That shouldn’t be the mindset.”