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YPD records lowest number of homicides since 2014
By JOE GORMAN
YOUNGSTOWN
City police Capt. Brad Blackburn says one of the keys to giving the city its lowest homicide rate in the last few years is fewer retaliatory shootings in 2016.
This past year, Youngstown recorded 18 homicides. The previous low number for city homicides in the 21st century was in 2003 and 2014, when 19 were recorded.
There is a chance the 2016 number may go up as the Mahoning County coroner has yet to rule on the death of a man who was found in early December in a parking lot on the East Side.
In 2015, the city recorded 23 homicides. Since 2010, the city has averaged roughly 22 homicides per year. The high for the decade was 26 in 2012.
Retaliatory shootings were one of the factors that fueled the high homicide numbers in the 1990s and the first part of the century. People would take matters into their own hands and look for revenge on their own.
Blackburn, head of the detective bureau, said detectives are now able to make arrests much faster in homicide cases, which often quashes the need for any retaliation because the person responsible is in custody.
Of the 18 homicides in 2016, police made arrests in 10 cases.
Police Chief Robin Lees said investigators have seen more mental-health issues creeping into some of their homicides this year, including a murder/suicide on the South Side in which a teenager stabbed his mother several times before killing himself; and the March bludgeoning death of an 87-year-old man on the North Side by his grandson. He said the numbers for 2015 were skewed a bit by a triple homicide in an arson.
Lees also credited the work of the patrol division for a reduction in the homicide numbers, saying officers on the road are able to make a lot of arrests and get weapons off the streets.
He said those arrests can lead to having someone in jail instead of on the street using the weapons to commit another crime.
Lees also credited detectives for their work in solving cases and also the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence, or CIRV, which helps identify and counsel young people who may be a target for violence.
Lees said he wants to see the downward homicide trend continue.
“We’d like to trend down under that 20 [homicides] and see how far we can get,” Lees said.
As the new year begins, there will be several new detectives assigned to investigate homicides after a wave of retirements over the past two years.
Blackburn said he has complete confidence in the new detectives, all of whom are multiyear department veterans who bring experience working in other units to the detective division.