Just halfway through 2016, San Bernardino has had 40 slayings. Police and city leaders are looking for ways to halt the trend.
The year is barely half over and San Bernardino already has logged 40 homicides.
I hope the town dubbed “Murder City” two decades ago for its frightening homicide rate isn’t returning to its bullet-riddled image as a city awash in blood.
Why is this happening now? Yes, crime rates are inching upward nationwide. But San Bernardino made it through the Great Recession with no uptick in capital crimes. Why the spate of slayings in 2016?
If homicides continue at this frightening pace, San Bernardino is on track to approach its record of the late 1980s and early 1990s that earned it the dreaded nickname.
To make sense of the senseless violence, I reached out to San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan, Police Foundation head Jim Bueermann and Cal State San Bernardino criminal justice professor Stephen Tibbetts.
Burguan published a heartfelt Facebook post Friday night, lauding the witnesses who came forward in the slayings of a 9-year-old boy, his father and the father’s friend outside a Del Rosa neighborhood liquor store July 8.
Too often, witnesses remain silent, perpetrators going unpunished and a cycle of violence and retaliation sets in, Burguan said.
“This week was different,” he wrote. “This week, dozens of people angered by the death of a 9-year-old called and helped us.”
But it shouldn’t take the death of a child to bring people forward, he wrote. “We need to be talking ALL of the time.”
When people remain silent, crime flourishes and people suffer, he said, adding, “the reputation of San Bernardino suffers because of the perception of random violence.”
It was a cry from the heart shared by three-quarters of the readers who saw it.
I asked Burguan whether his homicide detectives have been able to identify any commonality in the slayings this year.
“We see an overwhelming majority of our suspects have … significant criminal histories,” Burguan said, adding that offenders are not being rehabiliated. “They’re not coming out of prison better people than they were going into prison.”
There are commonalities in victim profiles, too, Burguan said: Many have gang connections or involvement with drugs, the same elements we’ve heard connected with crime in years past. “That’s always been consistent.”
So the average person who lives and/or works in San Bernardino needn’t fear? People seem to know that. At a recent Coffee with a Cop session, the biggest complaint was fireworks, Burguan told me.