What’s the answer to local violence?
Homicide numbers in Columbus and many other US cities have risen as the COVID-19 pandemic roils the country, exacerbating systemic social inequities
The man frantically screams at the 911 operator to quickly send help as his cousin lies dying on the caller’s apartment floor.
Moments earlier on the afternoon of Nov. 22, a gunshot was heard and the wounded man had burst inside, shouting that he had been shot in the neck at Ashton Pines, a rental community of apartments and townhomes on Columbus’ West Side.
“We need an ambulance over here,” said the distraught caller. “He’s dying. He needs help.”
The wounded man, 23-year-old Eric T. Washington, of the Southeast Side, was rushed to Ohiohealth Doctors Hospital after, police say, his girlfriend shot him while they argued outside. Within about an hour, Washington was dead.
Washington’s death, the 176th homicide this year in Columbus, solidified a grim reality that had seemed inevitable for months: 2021 would far surpass 2020 as the city’s deadliest on record.
Since then, another 25 people people have lost their lives to violence as the record death toll surpassed 200. A man’s death in March became the year’s 200th homicide on Tuesday in Columbus after the Franklin County Coroner’s office ruled it as such nine months later.
As 2021 comes to a close, families are
left grieving while law enforcement officials and experts are left trying to make sense of what’s driving the lethal violence, which has not spared any corner of Columbus nor other large city across the United States.
“People are desperate,” said Chenelle Jones a criminal justice professor at Franklin University in Columbus, whose areas of expertise includes policing. “At the end of the day, something needs to be done, especially in the city of Columbus.”
The FBI released a report this year finding that the number of homicides in the United States jumped nearly 30% from 2019 to 2020, the single largest oneyear increase on record. Statistics show those numbers have continued to rise this year.
Columbus is not the only city in Ohio where homicides have reached record levels in recent years.
Toledo also set a one-year homicide record in 2021 that continues to climb after the 69th person was killed in mid-december, according to a report from The Blade.
And in Akron, homicides reached a record of 56 in 2020, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. This year, however, homicides dipped in Akron to 42 even though the city appeared to be on track to set another new record earlier this year, the Beacon reported.
Homicides in Cincinnati have increased by 19% this year over the threeyear average of 73 homicides as of middecember, year-to-date, according to statistics from the Cincinnati Police Department.
The Enquirer reported Monday that 2021 was on track to become the deadliest year in Cincinnati’s recorded history after 94 people were killed the year prior.
In neighboring Indiana, the capital city of Indianapolis — with a population of about 892,000 — has also seen a spike in homicide numbers.
Indianapolis reported 215 homicides in 2020. As of the end of November, 230 people had been killed in the city, according to an online database maintained by the Indianapolis Star.
But it’s not just homicides that have jumped the last two years in Columbus. Some other violent crimes, including felonious assaults, have risen sharply as well.
More than 1,400 felonious assaults had been reported by early December, an increase of more than 30% from the year prior, according to statistics from the Columbus Division of Police. Over the last two years, felonious assault reports more than doubled in that same timeframe.
The increasing level of violent crime has strained police resources, prompting the homicide unit to alter its work schedules to solve more cases and making it difficult for officers to respond to 911 calls as quickly as usual.
“There’s lawlessness on the streets right now, no respect for life, an unwillingness to communicate to solve problems, no fear of consequences,” said Cmdr. Robert Strausbaugh, who oversees the Columbus police Major Crimes Bureau.
Yet across the board, overall crime figures have declined in Columbus by about
15.8% since 2017, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading swiftly in March 2020, according to police figures through Nov. 30 for the last five years.
Among the individual crimes that have declined since 2017 are burglaries, which through the end of November dropped by 35.9%; and drug offenses, which decreased by 55.4%.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, motor vehicle thefts are among the crimes that have spiked since 2020, a problem regularly acknowledged by police, who say juveniles are behind many of the reports.
Between 2017 and 2019, the city averaged 3,991 reported vehicle thefts through the end of November. By Nov. 30 this year, 5,672 stolen vehicles had been reported.
And outside of Columbus, Cincinnati is among other cities where property crimes — again with the exception of vehicular theft — have steadily decreased. Burglaries alone fell by 24% from the year prior, according to the Cincinnati Police Department.
Jones, the Columbus criminologist, said the same pandemic-related factors that cause violent crime to rise — adults becoming unemployed, youth being without constructive activities — are also what has contributed to some nonviolent crimes falling. If people are quarantined at home, there are fewer opportunities for criminals to break in or commit property crimes, she said.
“Usually when you see an increase in crime, you see an increase across all areas, Jones said. “That’s why I’m calling it a ‘violence wave.’”
That violence has been steady and merciless this year, claiming in its wake the lives of nearly 30 young people under the age of 20 in Columbus.
In early December, a 6-year-old girl and her 9-year-old brother were killed in a hail of bullets while they sat outside their apartment in a car with their mother’s 22-year-old boyfriend, who was also
killed. The lead homicide detective on the case said it was a “targeted assassination” and that the two suspected gunman likely knew the children were in the car.
Though Columbus police have never said whether the fatal shooting was gang-related, criminologists have found that such targeted, non-random slayings involving youth drive many homicides in large cities.
In the Cincinnati area, an Enquirer analysis of Hamilton County Juvenile Court records found that 15 teenagers have been charged with murder this year, more than in the previous four years combined. In nearly every instance, the juveniles experienced instability in their homes and in their lives beginning at an early age, sometimes since birth, the Enquirer’s analysis found.
In Columbus, a study conducted this year by the National Network for Safe Communities confirmed that a relatively few individuals, many of them young people involved in gangs, drive much of the lethal violence. Those findings mirror trends in other large cities across the nation, where typically a fraction of individuals are behind half of the homicides.
The network has implemented its Group Violence Intervention initiative in other cities to reduce violence, and implored Columbus officials to do so as well. The initiative calls for community leaders, pastors and formerly imprisoned people to engage with youth identified as being at risk of committing homicides or falling victim to them.
City leaders, including Mayor Andrew J. Ginther and Police Chief Elaine Bryant, have indicated their support for such an approach.
Even as the mayor’s $1 billion budget proposal that includes $660 million in public safety funding awaits approval, people across Columbus are already working with at-risk youth and fighting social inequality that can often push someone to a life of violent crime.
Take one initiative unfolding on the East Side.
There, community leaders in three area commissions have formed the Greater East Side Coalition to find ways to collaborate together to address crime concerns so criminals don’t get pushed out of one neighborhood into the next.
Additionally, leaders of the 2 ⁄ -year-old Mid-east Area Commission have encouraged people in the 16 neighborhoods it covers to find constructive ways to interact with the young people of their communities, said Quay Barnes, who chairs the commission.
“You have to be part of their lives and they have to feel comfortable talking to you,” Barnes said. “That takes building relationships, that takes time.” elagatta@dispatch.com @Ericlagatta