Marion County officials quiet on findings of delayed gun violence research 

The Marion County Sheriff’s Office continues to delay disclosing the findings of researchers hired a year ago to investigate the state of deadly violence in rural areas of Salem.

The information was expected last year, following on similar work by the Salem Police Department.

The sheriff’s office retained the same consultants used by Salem at an original cost of $32,000.

After the report’s release was again delayed, sheriff’s office spokesman Sgt. Jeremy Schwab said on Wednesday that Marion County Sheriff Nick Hunter was coordinating a meeting to discuss the report with Marion County Commissioners Danielle Bethell, Kevin Cameron and Colm Willis.

Until then, Schwab said he wouldn’t disclose when the research began and when the sheriff’s office received a draft of the researchers’ results.

Sheriff’s officials told Salem Reporter last April that they hoped to publicly disclose their findings by late summer 2024. In recent months, the office has provided shifting estimates for when it planned to release its report.

“We are still working on releasing the document, which I hope will be within the next two to three weeks,” sheriff’s office spokesman Sgt. Jeremy Schwab said on Feb. 26.

The agency’s work has taken twice as long as that done for Salem police. The scope of the county analysis is broader in region, types of crimes and time period.

The research was expected to take four months, according to the contract for the Marion County Gun Violence Problem Analysis, which was set to expire in December 2024.

The project is intended to inform local policy as well as strategies to prevent future violence and intervene in the lives of those involved. 

“The goal of this analysis is to examine the circumstances of incidents, explore the characteristics of individuals involved, and identify the social networks at greatest risk for involvement in violence,” according to the contract.

The contract is with Dr. Lisa Barao, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Westfield State University in Massachusetts, and Christopher Mastroianni, a special operations group sergeant at the Hartford Police Department in Connecticut. 

The researchers serve leading roles in law enforcement programs dedicated to reducing gun violence, according to their earlier contract with the city of Salem. They were paid $15,500 under that contract.

They started their research into city violence in May 2023 and provided Salem police a draft report in August 2023, according to agency spokeswoman Angela Hedrick.

The city report, released publicly three months later in November 2023, showed that local shootings had doubled over five years and were largely concentrated in northeast Salem. But the researchers didn’t count parts of east Salem outside city limits, where the sheriff’s office responds to reports of violence. 

The study’s findings set in motion what Salem-area leaders are calling the Community Violence Reduction Initiative, a collective effort by law enforcement, community organizations and service providers to reduce deadly violence in the city.

Days after the city report was published, Hunter said in a joint work session that the same gun violence surge was likely happening in unincorporated areas on Salem’s east side.

During his campaign for election last fall, Hunter described reducing violent crime as one of his top priorities. 

The sheriff told Salem Reporter in October 2024 that the report his agency was preparing would include information about specific neighborhoods as well as data on other crimes such as vehicle theft and robbery, which he said often escalate to deadly violence.

“We need to be able to address the entire picture before we want to get to the root of what’s going on, and so we didn’t want to limit it to just what we saw with gun violence,” he said at the time.

The county agreement called for a review of data from 2014 to 2023. The new report is intended to show homicides and nonfatal injury shootings compared with long-term trends, demographics of people involved in aggravated assaults and gun crimes, and the geographical location of such incidents, including schools and parks.

The researchers were tasked with focusing on youth involvement in serious violence and gun crimes. They planned to analyze data on arrests of juveniles, as well as their status after being put on probation or released on parole from a youth correctional facility.

Researchers also agreed to interview investigators and intelligence analysts at local police agencies, according to the contract. The agencies include the sheriff’s office as well as departments in Salem, Keizer, Woodburn and Stayton, which see the highest number of shootings in the county which leave people dead or injured.

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Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053.

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