Gun violence report will help city leaders craft intervention and prevention strategies

For a city of its size, Austin has a low rate of homicides from gun violence, averaging four per 100,000 residents over a 15-year period. But an “alarming” spike in shooting incidents following the Covid-19 pandemic – from January 2021 to December 2022 – caused the city’s homicide rate to surge to 8.3 and 7.1, respectively.

To understand some of the factors involved in the burst of violent crime during this period, the city’s Office of Violence Intervention, a relatively new division that grew out of a 2019 resolution by City Council, contracted with the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, a nonprofit organization focused on reducing incarceration and violent crime, and Dr. Chico Tillmon, a national violence prevention consultant, to conduct an analysis of gun violence in Austin.

The consultants, working with the Austin Police Department, examined a sample of 142 homicides from the spike in shootings that occurred in Austin between 2021 and 2022. Officer-involved shootings, accidental self-inflictions and justified self-defense incidents were excluded from the study.

The report, released earlier this month, states that the goal of the analysis was to review the circumstances of each incident, explore the characteristics of the parties involved and “identify the networks associated with the highest risk of violence.”

The detailed review, known in the criminal justice field as a gun violence problem analysis, was conducted with some limitations, the researchers note. Typically, the researchers examine both fatal and nonfatal shootings and homicides, “but we were only allowed to conduct interviews for homicide incidents,” they note. Additionally, the consultants were unable to interview the homicide investigators who worked the cases due to staffing shortages within APD. They instead interviewed sergeants within the homicide division.

“This approach typically limits the detailed information researchers can collect regarding motives and the individuals involved,” the report states.

But researchers did find several key takeaways from studying the 142 homicide cases, which may inform the city’s emerging crime prevention efforts.

Some of the highlights of the findings include:

• Most shootings are concentrated among a small group of young adult white and Black males ranging between ages 18 and 34 with criminal histories, with many having associations with groups or gangs.
• Nearly 54 percent of victims and suspects were white, and almost 43 percent were Black. Roughly 32 percent of victims and suspects were Hispanic.
• Black individuals are overwhelmingly overrepresented as homicide victims and suspects.
• Suspects tend to be younger than victims – about 50 percent of the suspects were 24 or younger.
• About 63 percent of homicide victims and suspects were known to the criminal justice system prior to the incident, with 54 percent having had prior felony convictions.

The report sounds a hopeful note in its conclusion: “There are promising efforts underway to implement focused deterrence measures in the APD and community violence intervention programs out of the Office of Violence Prevention. Expanding and coordinating these efforts could prove successful in reducing gun violence in Austin.”

Photo by St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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