Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
San Bernadino suffers surge in violence
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — The sound of gunfire and sirens drew about a dozen people out of their homes on San Bernardino’s west side one recent Wednesday night.
A beat-up Honda sat in the street — a small cross dangling from the rearview mirror, two bullet holes in the door. Rescue workers pulled Alejandro Herrera, 28, from the driver’s seat and wheeled him into an ambulance.
“The other day, they killed someone down the street,” said a middle-age woman, leaning against a fence next to her husband. All around this part of the city, she said, there are candlelight memorials to victims of violence.
“Before, we would hear about killings every once in a while. Now, there are so many,” she said, asking that her name not be published for fear of becoming a victim herself.
A few days later, in a neighborhood less than two miles away, investigators pulled the body of Jose De La Torre, 24, from the trunk of a Nissan.
The next night, Shonta Edwards, 33, was shot to death outside an apartment complex about half a mile from there.
And soon enough, Herrera, who died at the hospital, had his own candlelight memorial on the sidewalk in the neighborhood where he was shot.
150 SHOOTINGS IN 2016
San Bernardino, still healing from the Dec. 2 terror attack, has seen a surge in violence this year unlike any it has faced in decades. With four months left in 2016, there have been 150 shootings and 47 slayings in the city of 216,000 residents. It had 44 homicides all of last year, including the 14 people killed by terrorists at the Inland Regional Center.
The city is on track to have more murders than in any year since 1995, when 67 people were killed, and there is no clear explanation why.
Residents and officials point to a police force hobbled by budget cuts and attrition. But the budget situation was bad last year too, and the homicide rate was far lower.
San Bernardino has had about as many homicides as Oakland, which has nearly twice the population. San Jose, almost five times more populous than San Bernardino, has had 35 killings.
If the current pace continues, San Bernardino will end the year with a homicide rate of about 31 per 100,000 residents. Chicago’s rate last year was about 18; Los Angeles had seven.
In addition to the 47 homicides, three people have been killed by police.
“Our city right now is bad,” said resident Aguadia Brown, 27, whose cousin, a friend and his son all were killed this year. “It’s like everyone is on edge, and nobody really knows how we’re going to fix this.”
The killings have disproportionately victimized the city’s black residents, who account for 14 percent of the population but nearly half of those killed. Certain neighborhoods have been affected, but the mayhem has occurred throughout the city.
Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said the city has been especially hard hit by state initiatives that reduced some drug and property-related felonies to misdemeanors, leading to shorter sentences for criminals.
Others say the city’s dearth of economic opportunities, its years of cuts to diversion programs and a lack of other basic services — such as working street lights in many neighborhoods — have contributed to this year’s violence.
Because of San Bernardino’s financial turmoil, which began even before it declared bankruptcy in 2012, the size of the Police Department has been reduced repeatedly over the years.
The ranks have gotten so thin that officers who specialize in drugs, gangs and traffic enforcement have been reassigned to patrol just to keep up with calls for service.
“We’re not getting to calls fast enough,” Burguan said. “We don’t have the capacity to investigate everything that’s reported in the city.”
The Dec. 2 attack turned the world’s eyes toward San Bernardino. And the presidential election has made it a political talking point.
But even as its name has come to symbolize the dangers Americans face at the hands of terrorists, the city is suffering a mounting nightly toll with little attention from the outside. ‘PSYCHOLOGICAL TOLL’
Two days before Herrera was killed, a few dozen clergy members, residents and activists gathered to call for an end to the violence.
They began in front of St. Bernardine Church, the city’s oldest Catholic parish, and walked two-by-two to City Hall, about a half-mile away, shouting, “Alive and free is what we want to be.”
When they reached the steps of City Hall, a woman read aloud the names of San Bernardino’s homicide victims. The march and recitation of names are a monthly ritual organized by Inland Congregations United for Change, a coalition of local religious groups and others that has been pushing the city to do more to stop the killings.
Organizer Sergio Luna, a father of two children who has lived in San Bernardino for 17 years, says the violence weighs on the entire community.
“Knowing there’s a few shootings within a few blocks from your house,” he said, “that brings a psychological toll.”
While the death toll is particularly high this year, Luna said that for years, San Bernardino has had a high homicide rate that went largely ignored.
After the terror attack, he said, “all of a sudden, everyone cared about mass shootings in San Bernardino. But we’ve been crying about urban gun violence for many years.”
Since 2014, when there were 43 homicides — about one every eight days — the group has been pushing the city to adopt Operation Ceasefire, a program used in cities around the nation to reduce homicides by reaching out pre-emptively to those at risk of violence.
Burguan, the police chief, said that earlier this year, the city was turned down for a state grant to help fund Operation Ceasefire.
The decision made Burguan wonder whether the city is alone in its battle against killings, he said.
“Who really is that concerned about San Bernardino? Or are people at the state level happy letting San Bernardino drown in this stuff?” he said. “We clearly have the most significant crime spike of any place in the state, and all that money went elsewhere.”