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| Photo Credit: AP. |
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Cameron Taylor was watching an illegal street race that had attracted hundreds to an intersection in Portland, Oregon, but decided to leave as the crowd got increasingly unruly. Moments later, gunfire erupted and Taylor was hit by a stray bullet as he and a friend headed to their car.
Police, who
were overwhelmed with 911 calls about other shootings, couldn’t control
multiple street takeovers in the city that night and had trouble finding the
victims of three shootings that occurred during the chaos.
“His friend
who was with him put him in the car and drove him out to get him to the
hospital, but he was not able to make it and that friend called his parents” to
say Taylor was dead, family friend Erin Russell told The Associated Press.
Taylor, 20,
died Sunday the same day that four high-profile, public shooting rampages in
Bend, Oregon, Phoenix, Detroit and Houston drew national headlines. His slaying
went largely unnoticed amid the daily toll of gun violence that has come to
define Portland and a number of other American cities since the pandemic.
Homicide
rates appear to be dropping in some major U.S. cities, such as New York and
Chicago, but in others killings are on the rise, particularly from guns. In
Portland, the homicide rate surged 207% since 2019 and there have been more
than 800 shootings so far this year. In Phoenix, police Chief Jeri Williams
said this week the gun violence was the worst she’d seen in 33 years on the
job.
“How many more officers have to be shot? How many
more community members have to be killed before those in our community take a
stand? This is not only a Phoenix police issue, this is a community issue,” she
said after a weekend that tallied 17 shootings and 11 homicides citywide.
Now, police
are on edge heading into Labor Day weekend, with its traditional end-of-summer
festivities, and some are adding extra patrols as they brace for more potential
violence.
In Portland,
police busy with three killings and nine non-fatal shootings in 48 hours
couldn’t control three illegal street races last weekend that attracted
hundreds and shut down major intersections for hours. In Houston, the day after
a gunman shot five neighbors, killing three, another man shot two sisters
before killing himself.
In the past
two weeks, authorities in Phoenix have confiscated 711 guns and made 525
gun-related arrests as part of a targeted crackdown. Nearly 90% of homicides
there this year were by gun, police said. In Detroit, where a man is accused of
shooting three people at random on city streets last weekend, authorities are
also cracking down on gun violence in high-crime neighborhoods through Labor
Day.
“Let’s stop
talking about our inability to respond to crime in the community. Let’s stop
advertising to criminals that they’re going to get away with it,” Portland
Mayor Ted Wheeler said, using an expletive at a City Council meeting this week
after police Chief Chuck Lovell once more asked for more officers.
“I think we
should stop using the messaging at every turn, that the reason we can’t help
our citizens with basic criminal justice issues is because we don’t have the
personnel,” Wheeler said. “We’ve got to figure out better ways to address this
crisis.”
Last
weekend’s rampages — which included a heavily armed assailant who stormed a
central Oregon supermarket, random shootings on Detroit streets and a Phoenix
man who opened fire while wearing body armor — were shocking and scary, but
they aren’t representative of the broader toll gun violence is taking on
American society, experts said.
Victims
killed in mass shootings make up about 1% of all those killed in gun homicides
nationwide, despite headlines that instill fear in many Americans, said James
Fox, a professor at Northeastern University who has created a database of mass
killings stretching back to 2006 with The Associated Press and USA Today.
All four
shootings last weekend didn’t even meet the database’s definition of a mass
killing — four or more people, excluding the assailant, killed in a 24-hour
period — but they nonetheless sowed fear because of the random nature of the
violence, he added.
“Those don’t tend to make news. They don’t
tend to scare people because people say, ’Well, that’s not my family,” Fox
said. “We have as many as 20,000 gun homicides a year, and most of those are
one victim. Sometimes two, sometimes three, (but) rarely four or more.”
The pandemic
and the social unrest it caused has also played a role. Eight million Americans
became first-time gun owners between 2019 and 2021, said Jeffrey Butts,
director of the research and evaluation center for the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice at City University of New York.
“We already
had 400 million guns in circulation. So when you bump that up and include a lot
of first-timers in the population, you get accidents, you get precipitous
behavior, you get people reacting to small insults and conflicts with their
guns because they’re in their pocket now,” he said.
Meanwhile
Taylor’s friends and family mourn his death in Portland.
The car
aficionado and beloved big brother who loved barbecues and spending time with
his family was “at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Russell said.
“He has a
lot of friends and a lot of family who love him dearly, and this is a
devastating loss.”
Associated
Press reporter Walt Berry in Phoenix contributed to this report.
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Gillian Flaccus on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gflaccus