‘UNCHECKED FLOOD’ OF GUNS DRIVES VIOLENT CRIME WAVE
Shootings, deaths still rising in Pittsburgh; experts cite pandemic, police shooting fallout
For Pittsburgh, the shootings erupted last year just four days into January when a victim was gunned down on the North Side. Less than a week later, a 41-yearold McKees Rocks man was shot dead in Northview Heights.
From that fatal start, the city was swept up in a spate of violence not seen in years.
The final spasm took place on New Year’s Eve when three people in Homewood were attacked and killed: Nandi Fitzgerald, her 12-year-old son, Denzel Nowlin Jr., and Tatiana ‘Tay’ Hill. The shootings left local community leaders stunned.
Just as it began, the year closed out with gunfire and young lives cut short.
The Rev. Eileen Smith, executive director of the South Pittsburgh Coalition for Peace, said the mayhem during the pandemic is among the worst periods of street violence she has ever experienced.
“It is horrible. And people are afraid,” said Rev. Smith, who has worked in violence prevention for years. “People just don’t know what to do. There’s a spirit out there of fear and anger.”
Earlene Clancy, of Mount Washington,is one of those people. Her 17-year-old son, Izeyah, was gunned down outside an Allen town convenience store in May.
“The pain,” Ms. Clancy said, “is unbearable. It just tears the family apart.”
Now the 42-year-old mother worries about Izeyah’s siblings, ranging from 7 to 25, and is wary of her neighborhood, refusing to venture out after dark even to haul out the garbage.
“I don’t do anything at night. I’m just scared,” Ms. Clancy said. “I fear for the rest of my children here in the City of Pittsburgh.”
Pittsburgh had 56 homicides last year — a nearly 10% rise from 2020. But those who died are hardly the only victims. Shootings in which people survived have also risen.
In 2021, the city was hit with a 17% jump in nonfatal shootings and homicides. And over the course of the entire pandemic, the results are even more striking: a 49% spike since 2019 — the city’s sharpest two-year increase in at least a decade, largely reversing the reductions in gun violence in the years leading up to the pandemic.
The onslaught of gun violence was no different in many cities across the country,where homicides in some municipalities reached unprecedentedlevels.
During the first year of the pandemic, murders rose by 30% nationally, and then last year they rose by another 7%, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks violent crime. At least a dozen major cities shattered homicide records that had been in place in some cases for decades.
‘Serious problems’
Experts blamed soaring gun violence on a combination of factors: the pandemic, fallout from protests and fury over police killings, a surge in gun sales, and firearms ending up on the streets. Schools shut down, support systems were disrupted and tempers flared.
Disputes on social media broke out. People struggled to find services for at-risk children, and those doing intervention on the streets were cut off from visiting prisons, jails and hospitalized shooting victims.
The Rev. Cornell Jones, Pittsburgh’s director of street outreach, said his team knew the pandemic would be dangerous. “Everyone was on the edge,” he said. “The strategy that we use connects with people and places. When COVID kicked off, those were two things that were in a lot of ways shut down.”
Gunfire escalated on the South Side last summer, with a series of shootings unnerving residents and city officials, prompting special police patrols. “We are having serious problems. It doesn’t matter if the officers are there or not, there is just ongoing violence,” Wendell Hissrich, Pittsburgh’s former public safety director, said at the time.
Zone 3, the police precinct that runs from the South Side Flats to Carrick, saw the sharpest spike among Pittsburgh’s six zones, with 52 shootings and killings last year, compared to 36 the year before.
Shootings around East Carson Street, the busy thoroughfare and nightlife magnet, largely subsided after the summer, but on New Year’s Day, a shooting wounded three.
City Councilman Bruce Kraus represents the South Side and some of the neighborhoods hardest hit by gunfire. “Firearms mixed with firewater,” he called the combination of alcohol and guns.
Mr. Kraus puts the blame for the shootings squarely on the “unchecked flood of handguns” and state and federal politicians who he said have done nothing to stanch the deadly flow.
“How and why can they sleep at night?” Mr. Kraus asked.
The police precinct covering the West End and some neighborhoods in the South Hills saw seven homicides last year, more than the past three years combined. The majority of those killings occurred in Sheraden.
An18-year-old was shot and killed on Stafford Street in April, and a juvenile was shot in the leg on Minton Street in June. That same day, a gunfight outside a bar on Chartiers Avenue left one man woundedand another dead.
Kristofer Metzger, a 35year-old Pennsylvania Army National Guard veteran, was shot March 6 on Zephyr Avenue while driving for Uber.
Just a block away, 39year-old Kia Reynolds was fatally shot in October during what police said was a domestic dispute.
Across town, the highest level of gun violence occurred in a part of the city that has historically struggled with shootings — Zone 5, which covers Pittsburgh’s eastern neighborhoods, including Homewood, Larimer, Lincoln-Lemington, East Liberty and East Hills.
Triple murder in Homewood
David Harris, a longtime criminal justice researcher at the University of Pittsburgh’s law school, has watchedthe upward trend in violence unfold across the nation, but he notes that other crimes like burglaries and robberies, have not followed suit.
“It is a homicide problem and more specifically a gun homicide problem. It is, in most places, not a general crime problem,” Mr. Harris said.
While Pittsburgh’s current surge is concerning, it’s not unprecedented, he noted. “If we look at what
we’re experiencing as a city, we’re still on a historically downward curve in terms of gun violence.”
In fact, homicides peaked in 2014 with 71 killings. And according to a report from the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, Pittsburgh averaged 200 nonfatal shootings annually for a dozen years starting in 2000 — more than last year’s 162.
Still, the most recent violent surge comes after Pittsburgh was making headway in reducing shootings prior to the pandemic — a trend that concerns victim advocates.
The murder of 12-year-old Denzel Nowlin Jr. in Homewood on New Year’s Eve capped a difficult year not
only for the neighborhood but also across Pittsburgh, where 15 children and teens died from gun violence, the most in at least seven years, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette analysis found.
With schools closed, afterschool activities canceled and outreach programs for at-risk youth disrupted over the past two years, the pandemic has been especially hard on children and the resources meant to keep them out of harm’s way.
Young people have been spending more time on social media, where conflicts can build up and then explode into violent confrontations on the streets, experts said.
While the circumstances of Denzel Jr.’s death are not yet known, the specter of gun violence has long stretched over his family.
At 2 months old, Denzel Jr. was mentioned in a 2009 Post-Gazette story about his father going to state prison at age 16 after pleading guilty to armed robbery. At the time, Denzel Jr.’s paternal grandmother already had lost a son to gun violence, another was in prison and a third was in theAllegheny County Jail.
“He was a shining star,” said Ayo Young, a violence prevention specialist and vice president of Homewood Community Sports, where Denzel Jr. played football.
Ms. Clancy firmly believes the pandemic played a major role in the swell of the gun violence that took her son Izeyah’s life. Bored kids, shuttered schools, irritable parents — something had to give.
“You had nothing open and available that was positive for the children to do when COVID struck,” she said. “Every day I woke up, somebody’s child was murdered. I was like, ‘I know that mom’s pain, and I know that mom’s pain, and oh gosh, another mom. I know her pain.”
Tempers flared
Pittsburgh is not alone. Data from the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks gun violence nationwide, shows that more than 5,600 minors were killed or injured last year, an increase of 10% from 2020 and 48% from 2019.
Rev. Smith remains hopeful that her program and the “peacemakers” who work in neighborhoods to defuse violence will continue to make a difference. It’s not easy, though, she said.
“We get frustrated every time we see a young person go down. We get frustrated every time we see a young person shooting another young person or anybody. Their lives are over at that point,” Rev. Smith said. “We get frustrated all the time and No. 1, that’s because there’sa lack of resources.”
Over the years, Pittsburgh has launched numerous initiatives to address gun violence, including the Stop the Violence Trust Fund. From 2016 to 2019, shootings and homicides dropped by nearly 40%. Meanwhile, gun seizures by Pittsburgh police rose steadily prior to the pandemic, leveling off last year at 920 firearms.
Allegheny County is also working to curb gun violence outside the city limits. Slayings overall in the county, which includes homicides in Pittsburgh, hit triple digits again last year, rising to 120 killings.
Earlier this month, the county’s Department of Human Services issued a request for proposals from groups seeking funding to stem violence in hard-hit communities: Braddock, Clairton, Duquesne, East Pittsburgh, Homestead, McKeesport, McKees Rocks, Mount Oliver, North Braddock, Penn Hills, Rankin, Stowe and Wilkinsburg.
The county noted that most cities with high rates of violence lack the resources to mount a coordinated strategy.
“Gun violence has increased. And communities in Allegheny County have worked hard to reduce violence in their public spaces. They have made progress, and we know they need support to move forward in their efforts,” said Erin Dalton, director of the county’s human services department.
In Pittsburgh, Mr. Kraus has seen anti-violence programs come and go. He gave a sobering assessment of Pittsburgh’s efforts to combat the scourge during his tenure.
“I started my 15th year, and there’s not been improvement.We’re a culture and society that’s obsessed with handguns, and it’s reflected in the gun violence that we’re seeing,” he said.
‘Whatever it takes’
Now, though, there’s a new mayor. In his campaign last year, then-candidate Ed Gainey emphasized gun violence as a public health crisis. As a state legislator in 2019, he was part of a group urging restrictions on military-stylerifles.
“There’s no question the impact of the mental health state that gun violence creates,” Mr. Gainey said at the time. In a written statement to the Post-Gazette last week, Mr.Gainey said gun violence is a struggle that Pittsburgh has faced “for generations,” but the overall problem with shootings can’t just be solved throughpolice action.
Jobs, increased education, affordable housing and a host of social needs are part of the solution, he said. “We need a clear strategy to tackle gun violence in the frame of a public health approach in order to ensure we can make meaningful steps towards ending this pandemic.”
As part of that approach, he said one of his goals would be to enlist the help of some of the city’s largest employers, foundations and other social service groups. “We will convene a roundtable of providers, activists and city agencies not only to discuss the problem or research the problem but also to make connections with those already doing this work to develop and implement concrete recommendations. We need to assess what’s working, build upon those things and fill the gaps on the rest.”
The issue is intensely personal for Mr. Gainey: His 29-year-old sister was shot and killed in 2016 outside a bar in Homewood.
Ms. Clancy is counting on the mayor’s experiences to help shape his approach to tackling gun violence.
Asked if she had a message for Mr. Gainey, Ms. Clancyhad a ready answer.
“My message is: I know he can’t do it by himself, but clean it up. It has to be cleaned up. It has to. We have to do better as a city. As a mayor he has to get us started,” she said. “Whatever it takes, it has to get done.”