Homicides, shootings spiked in Providence in 2020

Providence saw a spike in homicides and shootings in 2020.

The Police Department recorded 18 homicides in the year. The department reported 13 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters to the FBI in 2019 and 10 in 2018, according to FBI data. 

The increase in shootings, which include people killed or injured by gunfire, was even starker: 73 victims as of Dec. 29, compared to 35 for all of 2019. That’s just as troubling as the increase in murders, because the difference between a fatal shooting and a nonfatal shooting is often just luck. 

The increases came despite a remarkably peaceful start to the year. In the nearly six months between the beginning of October 2019 and late March 2020, there were no homicides, a stretch broken by the shooting death of a man in Roger Williams Park. 

As the summer wore on in a pandemic-weary society convulsed by unrest and protest, things got worse, and the timing — multiple homicides and shootings each week over some stretches — added to a sense that things were spiraling out of control: A teen fatally stabbed in the Providence Place mall’s food court, a contractor shot to death outside a home, a man killed while filming a music video, shots ringing out near the mayor’s house. 

“When it happens, it’s nerve-wracking,” Mayor Jorge Elorza said in an interview. “It’s chilling. And it hits home.” 

At the same time, “there has never been a moment where I have felt unsafe because of it,” Elorza said. 

Homicides are still lower than they have been in past decades in Providence, Elorza noted. Shootings, while well above the number in 2019, are still lower than they were in 2011, when there were about 110, he said. In other words: Providence has seen some, but not all, of its gains in the last few years swept away. 

And the wave of violence that reached Providence has reached many other cities, too, with homicides up 20% in Washington DC, 40% in New York City and 20% nationwide over the first nine months of the year, according to the Washington Post. 

“We’ve had a breakdown in our social-support systems,” Elorza said. “What we’re seeing right now is exactly what happens when our social-support system breaks down.” 

Along with pandemic disruptions, cities around the country saw protests against the police, sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May. Locally, Providence erupted in protests over the police-involved moped crash that severely injured 24-year-old Jhamal Gonsalves. 

But Elorza — who noted he’s “never used the term ‘defund the police’” because he’s never seen a proposal that lays out what that would actually look like — said the city has not seen a significant dip in people’s cooperation with the police in the wake of shootings. 

Still, investigators need people to come forward with what they know, rather than try to take matters into their own hands, Elorza said. It’s a longstanding problem.

“It speaks to this point of getting people comfortable, trusting and speaking to police,” Elorza said. 

People who study crime say they’ll debate the causes for years. 

Locally, experts point to the disruptions caused by the COVID pandemic, and a society awash in guns. 

“Right now, the world is very stressed,” said Eric Bronson, professor and dean of Roger Williams University’s School of Justice Studies. “In the United States, we have learned to deal with stress or conflict with violence. When you have guns readily available, you solve that conflict with violence, and when the guns are there, you’re going to use the gun.” 

There’s a term of art that sociologists use that sums up the year that was 2020: “normlessness.” It’s the absence of norms and expectations about how things are supposed to go in life. People’s routines get upended. They’re anxious. They’re anxious about their health, their finances. The way they think things should happen suddenly changes, mostly for the worse. 

“Whenever that happens, we see upticks in suicide, violence, murder,” Bronson said. “When there’s a total disruption of how we think things should happen and how we’re used to things occurring, we’re going to see these spikes in gun deaths — suicide, gun violence, murder. That’s totally expected.” 

Anecdotally, the people who are trying to stop the violence are seeing that theory play out in real time, with unimaginably painful consequences. 

Lisa Pina-Warren, director of victim services and street outreach for the Nonviolence Institute, said her organization helped 320 victims in 2020. The number in 2019 was 164. That reflects statewide data, although most are in Providence, she said. 

The increase wasn’t all the result of street feuds, Pina-Warren said. Many times people didn’t know who had hurt them, or why. At times it might be an argument over something as small as which container to put the garbage in, she said. 

“You can tell people are on edge,” Pina-Warren said. “People’s norms have been changed. You flip someone’s life upside down. I think people are anxious, people are very nervous, people are losing loved ones [to COVID], they have family members ill or can no longer be around because they may be elderly or compromised health-wise.” 

While it’s probably making the problem worse, the COVID pandemic is definitely making the solutions more difficult. Events have been canceled. Video-conferencing applications like Zoom might be a substitute for a morning work meeting, but not for a condolence hug. Coronavirus restrictions have put a halt to hospital visitation for victim services and victims’ families. 

“It’s awful,” Pina-Warren said. “It’s awful. Funeral services and arrangements have been very difficult to make. You have a homicide, a loved one is inside the ER, the whole family arrives at the emergency room and they can’t even come in the emergency room to see their loved one. Sometimes that right there is very traumatic, because some people need that for some type of closure.” 

Cedric Huntley, who took over as the institute’s interim executive director in 2020, has been involved in the organization for two decades. Violence has spiked, but still not to the levels they’d seen when he first arrived or in the decade before that, Huntley said. In 2000, the city police reported 30 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters to the FBI. In 2001 and again in 2002, there were 23. 

According to FBI data, there were also 18 murders and manslaughters in 2014, but killings in the years since were mostly in the low teens. 

“We’ve seen an uptick,” Huntley said. “We’ve also seen where it was, and we’ve seen the work we have in Providence — the work that we’ve done with law enforcement in bridging those gaps, working in the community, working in outreach, and we’d seen those numbers decrease over time.” 

Even as they try to do the work on the ground to take back some of the gains they’ve lost, the COVID pandemic has hampered their efforts, Huntley said. 

“Every nonprofit is struggling right now,” Huntley said. “We could use more resources, absolutely.” 

Col. Hugh T. Clements Jr., chief of the Providence police, said he believes 2020 will end up being an aberration, not the start of a new trend. 

Among other things, the pandemic disrupted the drug supply, which may have led to disputes over customers, Clements said. And the pandemic, along with protests against the police, also made police-community interactions less frequent, he said. 

But overall, property crime and other violent crime is down again, with only murders, shootings and motor-vehicle thefts increasing, Clements said. It stands to reason that burglaries would decrease when everyone’s at home. 

“2020 was an unusual year in so many ways,” Clements said. “The pandemic, the other issues we had. But [Providence] is safe. We have to get back to where we’ve been successful.” 

That, Clements said, involves working with groups like the Nonviolence Institute, which is well known enough in the halls of the PPD to be known just as “the Institute.” 

On the enforcement side, guns are a major issue, Clements said. In the year, a major firearms theft was reported in Smithfield, and a man in Providence was accused of selling dozens of guns on the streets and falsely reporting them missing.  

Even legitimate gun buying was way up.

“We saw a huge surge in this state and around the country on gun buying in 2020,” Clements said. “We saw a huge surge in ammo.” 

Michael-Sean Spence, the director of community safety initiatives for the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, said cities like Providence are seeing two pandemics: COVID and gun violence.

“It has truly been a unique and deadly year in 2020 and across the country, in Providence and a number of other cities as well,” Spence said. 

Policymakers need to give funding to people on the community level, Spence said — to groups like the Nonviolence Institute that know their cities best. State lawmakers should push for stricter gun control and authorities should crack down on bad actors in the gun industry, Spence said. 

“We recognize the necessity for police being able to effectively and timely respond to the most violent incidents,” Spence said. “But we also acknowledge the role communities and community-led strategies like street outreach have played in stopping the cycle of violence.” 

Of the 18 homicides in 2020, police have solved seven, Maj. David Lapatin, who leads the department’s detectives, said in December. 

Lapatin said the detectives are focused on getting guns off the streets. Without specific intelligence, it’s hard to tell if someone is planning on shooting someone. Only taking the gun out of the equation stops it. 

Most of the shootings seem to be targeted, Lapatin said, although there’s always a risk of someone getting hit by a stray bullet. Still, Lapatin said he personally still feels safe in Providence. 

“We’re doing the best we can to turn it around,” Lapatin said, “and I think we have turned a corner on it.”

bamaral@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7615

On Twitter: @bamaral44

Rising, falling ...

Murders and non-negligent manslaughters reported in Providence since 1994. 

2020: 18*

2019: 13

2018: 10

2017: 12

2016: 10

2015: 15

2014: 18

2013: 12

2012: 17

2011 N/A

2010: 15

2009: 23

2008: 12

2007: 11

2006: 11

2005: 20

2004: 17

2003: 18

2002: 23

2001: 23

2000: 30

1999: 26

1998: 15

1997: 12

1996: 16

1995: 25

* Data for 2020 remains preliminary

Source: FBI statistics