Why is Murder Up in Winston Salem

Murder rate rising

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Twenty-Five Murders: City's homicide count in 2007 was highest in 11 years

By Dan Galindo

JOURNAL REPORTER

Angel Saguilan was the first person killed last year. He was shot and left to die in the parking lot of his apartment complex on Hutton Street on New Year’s Day.

Jose Marin was the last person to die. He was shot Dec. 2 in front of Hall-Woodward Elementary School as more than a hundred people watched a soccer game nearby.

The men were two of the 25 people killed here in 2007. The last time homicide numbers were that high was in 1996, when the city was smaller and more violent. There were 28 homicides that year, down from a peak of 41 in 1994.

Experts and police say that the jump in the number of homicides, combined with an increase in violent crimes here and around the nation, may be a sign that Winston-Salem is getting more dangerous.

“It suggests the possibility that the city is moving back to the darker days of the late 1980s and early 1990s when murder was at its highest levels nationwide,” said Matthew Robinson, a criminologist at Appalachian State University.

Others say that an increase from 21 homicides in 2006 to 25 this year shouldn’t be seen as dire. “If we had several years of growing numbers, that could be viewed negatively by someone looking at us here,’’ Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines said. “I think most cities see that their homicide rates go up and down. You have to look at your overall violent-crime rate, and when you look at that we are lower than other North Carolina cities.”

Gayle Anderson, the president of the Greater Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce, took a similar view.

“If we were looking at going from 18 to 26 to 50 or whatever, then I think it would raise some questions,” she said. “The raw numbers are not so great that it would raise such questions, or it hasn’t so far.”

There are no easy explanations for the increase in the number of killings, Winston-Salem police say.

The rise could be tied to an increase in reports of violent crimes - robberies and assaults that are serious but not fatal.

Last year, violent crimes were up 14 percent, from 1,538 in 2006 to 1,760 through Dec. 29, police said. Reports of property crime in Winston-Salem increased by about 2 percent in the first full year after adding about 21,000 residents through annexation. Separately, Forsyth County had three homicides in 2007, the same as in 2006, the sheriff’s office reported.

Winston-Salem was not the only large city to see homicides increase. Raleigh, Durham and Greensboro all had more homicides in 2007 than in 2006. Homicides in Charlotte were down.

“We have to be prepared to handle the increase in violent crime. We have to place our resources there,” police Capt. David Clayton said. “Hopefully, the trend will reverse, but we certainly don’t know that; we can’t predict the future.”

Homicide picture similar to past years

Other than the overall jump, the city’s homicide picture seemed largely as it was in years past.

Most victims were black or Hispanic men, most cases led to arrests and the weapon of choice was a gun.

Of the people killed last year, three were women, four were white and eight were Hispanic. The remaining 13 people killed were black. One of the victims was police Sgt. Howard Plouff, who was killed as he tried to calm a crowd outside a nightclub. It was the first death of a Winston-Salem police officer in the line of duty since 1995.

Two teenagers were among the homicide victims. Chelsey Powers, 15, was shot on May 28. Terion Frazier, 14, was shot on March 6.

Arrests have been made in all but six of the homicides. Police would say little about the motives in any of the cases, other than identifying one case as a domestic-violence killing. They would not say how many of the 25 homicides involved drugs or robberies, two common motives, or how many involved gang members.

The police department has six detectives who primarily work homicides, including one who splits his time between old and new cases. The department plans to add 10 more detectives this year. An outside review of the department’s Criminal Investigation Division will help decide how the department assigns the new detectives.

For the first time since 2002, there were no child-abuse homicides in the city or county.

Krista Ragan, who compiles child-fatality numbers for the N.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, said that Forsyth County has had one to three child-abuse homicides in recent years.

Because it’s such a small number, it’s hard to know if it’s meaningful when it varies, she said.

As troubling as the year’s homicide total was in Winston-Salem, the numbers could turn out to be higher than 25.

Medical examiners determine whether a death is a homicide, and police are still waiting on an examiner for autopsy test results in the case of Crystal Faulk, a 24-year-old mother who was found dead in her apartment on Oct. 29. Faulk’s 7-month-old son, Quemani, also was found dead. Both bodies were decomposed.

Two other unusual deaths were not classified as homicides because a medical examiner could not find a cause of death after an autopsy and drug tests.

Brothers Mark Hackney and Steven Hackney were found dead in their home on Chilton Drive on Aug. 30, after neighbors hadn’t seen either one for at least 10 days. Both men had histories of mental illness, and neighbors said that they seemed to act bizarrely.

The home was a mess, with broken mirrors, glass, torn photos, trash and food covering the floors, according to an autopsy report. Both men were found naked, and Mark Hackney was lying next to a bottle of bleach.

A complex solution

Officials say that fighting violent crime and property crime depends on sound ideas - tracking and locking up chronic offenders, working to integrate felons into society when they are released and improving education and job opportunities. “I know that sounds cliche,” said Dan Besse, a Winston-Salem city council member, “but it’s pretty much the bottom line.”

The city also has to find ways to confront drug problems, said Alvin Atkinson, the interim director of Winston-Salem State University’s Center for Community Safety.

Drugs drive a lot of crime, he said. Addicts commit crimes to feed their addictions, and drug dealers use violence to protect their turf, he said.

“We can’t arrest this problem away,” he said.

Robinson, the ASU criminologist, said that most of what drives murder rates can’t be dealt with directly by policing.

“Murder is predicted by factors such as economic inequality, the availability of firearms in a city, the number of unsupervised young people in neighborhoods, and so forth,” he said.

Police chiefs around the country have complained about cuts in recent years to federal grants to fight crime, and Robinson said that cuts to crime prevention have come about because of a focus on terrorism.

“The bottom line for me is that this is about priorities. We have the resources to address the issues that create murder and other violent crimes,” he said. “However, we have chosen to utilize them elsewhere. So, in at least some sense, we get the amount of crime we deserve.”