(CN) — Two days after a shooting left five people injured and two dead in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a community gathered Monday evening in frustration and mourning. That same day, the FBI released data revealing murders rose nationwide by nearly 30% last year compared to 2019.
That hike is the largest one-year increase since the agency began keeping national statistics in 1960. Most of those killings — about 77% — involved guns. This year, there has been a 16% surge in murders just in the first half of 2021, according to the nonprofit Council on Criminal Justice. It also reports that gun assaults rose 5% between January and June 2021 compared to the same period last year.
Chattanooga, a mid-size city in southeastern Tennessee, saw on Saturday night one of its most violent incidents since a July 2015 terrorist attack in which four U.S. Marines and a Navy petty officer were killed, and more were injured, in two shootings at a military recruiting center and U.S. Navy Reserve center.
Police haven’t released many details about Saturday’s shooting, which remains under investigation. Officers were called to the scene, an affordable housing community near downtown Chattanooga, just before 11 p.m. that night. Six women and a 14-year-old girl had been shot during a block party. Two of them died; one was a mother to five children.
“I’m just tired,” said LaDarius Price, Chattanooga activist and community leader, during a small community action walk Monday evening to call for an end to the violence.
Price, a basketball coach and former special education teacher, recognized two of the victims as his former students.
“I’m just — I'm fed up with the way things are going, the way that we treat each other and do each other. We’re going to have to bring about a change in our communities,” he said.
Two other, unrelated shootings took place in Chattanooga Saturday, for a total of nine victims that day. But Chattanooga wasn’t the only Tennessee community to see exceptional violence this week.
In McMinn County, four people were shot and killed Saturday morning on a rural county road over an argument about a child. County Sheriff Joe Guy told WRCB-TV the county had not seen anything of that magnitude in the last 20 to 25 years, if ever.
Two days earlier, in Collierville — a town about 30 miles east of Memphis — one person was killed and 15 others injured after a man opened fire in a Kroger grocery store. Police say the gunman was a third-party vendor who had been asked to leave his job earlier that Thursday morning.
Collierville Police Chief Dale Lane called the shooting “the most horrific event in Collierville history.”
There are two events that seem to be driving this rapid rise in homicide and violent crime in the United States, according to Thomas Abt, senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice: First is the Covid-19 pandemic, and second is the social unrest following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“With both, we know that those factors are driving the numbers, but we don’t know exactly why,” he said, noting there are a few leading theories.
Social unrest may be rising because, in response to criticism and intense scrutiny prompted by Floyd’s death, police are pulling back from proactive policing approaches. Another theory, Abt said, is that when communities with long histories of experiencing discrimination — particularly at the hands of police — see yet another highly publicized police incident, it further damages their confidence in the system.
“As a result, they don’t use it. They don’t call 911, they don’t provide information to law enforcement, they don’t serve as jurors,” he said. “And ultimately, what that means is that the dispute resolution function of the criminal justice system is not used, and people are more likely to take the law into their own hands.”
Additionally, unemployment rates, financial, and food and housing insecurity are all mental health stressors intensified by the pandemic.
“Mental health is one of the biggest reasons that you see people getting involved in gun violence, you know, both as offenders and as victims,” said Christopher Herrmann, assistant professor of law and police science at CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Another driving factor is record gun sales for the last three years, Herrmann said.
“We have more guns than people now in the United States. That’s the reality,” he said.
Those guns, even if obtained legally, can find themselves in the wrong hands when gun owners don’t properly secure their firearms.
“One simple, proactive measure people could make now to potentially reduce gun violence is removing firearms from vehicles or at least securing them properly,” Chattanooga police spokesperson Elisa Myzal said. “More than half of firearms reported stolen from vehicles this year came from unlocked vehicles.”
Just in the first eight months of this year, 311 firearms were stolen from vehicles in Chattanooga, 174 of which were in unlocked vehicles.
“Gun violence prevention is not for [Chattanooga police] to bear alone,” Myzal said. “Community-wide, community-driven response is what is needed. Interdiction is needed in the most at-risk homes. People need to keep one another accountable.”
But, as Abt noted, community responses in some cases have been hampered by widespread distrust of law enforcement and the justice system following Floyd’s death.
Price, the Chattanooga activist, said Chattanooga’s police brutality protests following Floyd’s death created a “huge divide” between the city’s communities of color and law enforcement.
“There were so many people that were down there during that time. We’re talking about a situation that was not even in our state, somebody — and God bless his soul — we didn’t even personally know that individually that they were marching for. Yet, we’re losing lives right in our community, and I don’t see nobody out here marching.”
Fewer than two dozen people participated in the community action walk Price organized Monday.
“Nobody’s all in an uproar and upset and ready to go to war like they were against officers last summer,” he added. “Everything has its respective place, and at this point in time, these streets should be filled up with people saying ‘I’m sick and tired of stuff going on in my community the way that it’s going on,’ but yet, people remain silent.”
Price said that divide can be bridged by doing what he and others were doing Monday — getting out in the neighborhoods affected by gun violence and building relationships among neighbors and between law enforcement and the community.
At the end, the group stopped across the street from where investigators were still processing evidence from the scene where the seven women were hurt.
An 11-year-old girl who lived nearby asked to speak to the small group of people at the end of the walk.
“All we did that night is have fun,” she said. “We can’t even do that without people out here shooting, killing people. Killed two people. And it makes no sense at all. People lost they lives, got took away from they kids. And it’s not no ever coming back no more. Once they gone, they not coming back.”
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