Portland police says we could surpass record number of homicides
By DREW MARINE
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PORTLAND, OR (KPTV) — Portland is on track to break a record, as gun violence in the city is showing no signs of slowing down.
Tuesday, Portland Police said there were seven shootings in 15 hours. They all spanned across the east side of the city with the first shooting happening at 2:20 a.m. and the final shooting happening just before 7 p.m.
They said 1987 was a record year for homicides, with 70 that year. Data from the Portland Police Bureau shows that as of August this year, there were more than 830 shootings.
“This is the most violent time in my career. This is the highest level of gun violence I’ve seen,” Lt. Ken Duilio of Portland Police, said. He’s worked with the bureau for 24 years and said he knows the violence can’t be stopped overnight.
“Some of these shootings, especially if they’re gang-involved, they’re between rivals,” he said. “Some of the anger and some of the rage associated with the murders that have happened, you can see retaliation for years and years to come.”
So far this year, we’ve seen 63 homicides not including officer-involved shootings. Of those, 47 were shooting deaths. While Duilio said calendar years are important, if you look back about 12 months ago, we’ve seen plenty more homicides than that.
“I think people focus on the calendar year, January 1st to January 1st but really, we had a 12-month period from basically July 1st to July 1st where we had 93 homicides in the city, which is higher than the annual record,” he said.
Duilio has been a part of the Gang Enforcement Team, the Gun Violence Reduction Team and he’s now the acting Lieutenant for the Focused Intervention Team. FIT is a new effort by the city to help prevent gun violence.
“I think the community is pretty discouraged and pretty worried and they deserve better service. I think there’s a commitment now from the mayor’s office, city hall, the police bureau, to hopefully get the resources together to provide that better service,” Duilio said.
He said the previous gun violence teams have been criticized by the community, with the GVRT being disbanded last summer. Now, he hopes FIT, in collaboration with other efforts, will better serve everyone.
“The focused intervention team citizen oversight group – FITCOG – they’re involved in every aspect of this team. The development, the selection of the officers,” Duilio said. “If there’s something we’re doing that ‘Hey this doesn’t work as well, this is the community perspective’, they’ll help us change and adapt to have a team that the community is happy with.”
Duilio said the plan right now is to have the FIT fully operational by mid-November.
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