Police tackle shooting hotspots

WILMINGTON -- Three shootings in 61 minutes.

That was the frequency of shots-fired reports Wilmington police were handling Nov. 20, after investigating more than a dozen shootings in the 10 days prior. At 10:09 a.m., bullets struck a car on Mercer Avenue. Twenty minutes later, another volley of shots pierced the walls of two homes on North 11th Street, striking a mattress and a baby's crib. Forty minutes after that, a car was shot on Wayne Drive, just a block from the Mercer shooting.

That afternoon, WPD officials took to Facebook with a plea for peace: "Let's put an end to this before it gets worse."

From Nov. 10 through the first days of December, the Wilmington Police Department handled more than 20 shootings within city limits. The violence appears to be relenting as officers step up patrols, and police say they are zeroing in on gang connections between many of the shootings.

"What we have found is that we had a group of individuals within the last couple of months who were released from prison," police spokeswoman Linda Thompson said in an interview. "They possibly had some high level status at one time or another in these gangs, and since they have been released we have seen kind of an uptick (in violence)."

Hotspots

WPD organizes its patrols across 6 districts.

Since the shootings, police have responded with more patrols in two key districts: Northwest District 2, which runs from the Creekwood community to Oleander Drive, and Northwest District 3, which is centered on Castle Street and runs from Market Street to Greenfield Street.

According to a StarNews analysis of police reports and WPD news releases, since Nov. 10, 26 gun crimes have been reported in those two districts -- roughly three out of every four gun crimes reported in the city over that period.

Of those 26 crimes, 19 involved a gun being fired, while the remainder included an armed robbery, guns found or seized from felons, and one incident where someone pointed a gun at a person but did not fire, according to reports. Five out of six shootings since Nov. 12 that resulted in an injury happened in districts 2 and 3, reports show.

One of those happened in the 200 block of South 13th Street just after sundown on Nov. 25, when a teenage boy was shot. Though police scoured the block and called out their SABLE helicopter, no arrest has been announced in that shooting.

Community advocate Hollis Briggs lives in the neighborhood, and watched police work the crime scene that night.

"It's just so unfortunate that over the last 30 days there have been quite a few shootings, and I think the Wilmington Police Department as well as the community are getting frustrated," he said.

"When you’ve got wild bullets flying around a neighborhood, somebody's going to get seriously hurt, and it's probably not going to be the person it was intended for. Bullets don’t have names on them, and sometimes innocent people do get shot."

Gang connection

Since WPD stepped up patrols in response to the shootings, officers have announced 12 arrests. Nine of those arrested are validated gang members, with several belonging to either the Folk Nation gang or the Bloods, according to WPD spokeswoman Jennifer Dandron.

There was a similar spate of violence in Wilmington earlier this year, which, while smaller, turned deadly.

Those incidents started with the fatal Memorial Day shooting of Fuquan Wright, 23, who police said was shot while attempting to rob a house. In the following days, a teenager was stabbed and Darrell Atkinson, 47, was fatally shot.

While police have not specially identified those incidents as gang-related, they said they believed the three were connected. Atkinson had appeared to show disrepect to Wright on social media in the days before his death.

Later in the summer, two validated members of the Bloods gang died in separate shootings: Reuben Irvin, 31, on Harnett Street, and Quashon McRae, 25, in the Houston Moore community.

But lost in the buzz about the recent uptick is the fact that, statistically, Wilmington gun crime is not higher this year than last.

In fact, from Jan. 1 through Nov. 28, 52 people in the city were wounded by a bullet. That's down from 62 people shot in the same period in 2017.

"I think earlier in the year we put a lot of people who are violent away," Thompson said. "Unfortunately some of them are getting out, but I think we did a good job putting some of those main characters behind bars, which allowed things to slow down a little bit."

Reporter Cammie Bellamy can be reached at Cammie.Bellamy@StarNewsOnline.com.

November shootings

• ShotSpotter activations, Nov. 10 to 25: 42
• Confirmed gunfire incidents: 20-plus
• Shootings with injury: 6

Total ShotSpotter activations through Nov. 25

• 2017: 381
• 2018: 357

Total gunshot wounds through Nov. 25

• 2017: 62
• 2018: 52

Source: Wilmington Police Department