Takeaways: Report finds shootings tripled in Marion County over 10 years

Shootings across Marion County have more than tripled over the past decade, according to a new county report.

Teenagers as well as members of gangs or more informal groups have become increasingly involved in gun violence in recent years.

The report’s findings last week prompted Marion County leaders to call for a multi-agency team to address youth and gang violence. 

The Marion County Sheriff’s Office publicly released the report Tuesday following months of delays and after a March 24 public records request from Salem Reporter for a copy of the document.

READ IT: Marion County Crime Report and Gun Violence Problem Analysis

Marion County hired the same researchers brought in by the city of Salem for an earlier, smaller-scale study on gun violence – 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 city report was released in November 2023 and focused on shootings inside Salem city limits.

As part of the new report, researchers examined all 69 gun homicides and all 164 nonfatal injury shootings in Marion County between 2014 and 2023.

The report did not account for police shootings, confirmed suicides or cases of justified self-defense.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

1. Shootings across Marion County more than tripled over the past decade

Gun violence in Marion County increased by about 233% over the past 10 years, from 12 shootings in 2014 to 40 in 2023.

Marion County’s homicide rate has stayed relatively stable over the past 10 years. But the county’s rate of aggravated assaults steadily increased from 157 per 100,000 residents in 2013 to 246 per 100,000 residents in 2022.

Of the 233 shootings in Marion County over the past decade, 69 occurred in unincorporated areas, including 46 in east Salem.

Over half of shootings were investigated by the Salem Police Department, while nearly one-third were investigated by the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. Salem police also investigated nearly three in four aggravated assaults.

2. Gun violence largely impacts a small number of high-risk people 

Gun violence over the past decade most impacted Hispanic men between the ages of 18 and 34.

Victims and suspects were demographically similar across police agencies with two exceptions. Nearly all victims and suspects of shootings in Woodburn were Hispanic, and about three in four people involved in shootings in Keizer were 24 or younger.

Minors made up about 17% of suspects and 12% of victims. “This percentage of juvenile involvement is slightly higher than observed in other cities conducting violence analyses,” according to the report.

The study found that nearly three in four people involved in shootings that left people dead or wounded had previous involvement in the criminal justice system. 

Most victims and suspects with previous criminal offenses had been arrested about six times in Oregon, typically for unarmed crimes.

Shootings most often resulted from personal disputes, conflicts between gangs or more informal groups, and sudden disputes between strangers such as road rage incidents or bar fights.

“Even when gun violence incidents involved group/gang members, the motive for these shootings was not always a gang-on-gang conflict. Instead, most shootings were precipitated by personal disputes between individuals over money, prior criminal activities, and other interpersonal conflicts,” the report said.

3. Teenagers increasingly been involved in gun violence

The share of minors involved in shootings has increased in recent years.

Nearly one in five victims and suspects in 2023 shootings were minors, compared with about 6% in 2018. Between 2021 and 2023, nearly one in three shooting suspects were minors.

Unlike adults, more than half of minors didn’t have a criminal history.

Of the 65 minors involved in gun violence over the past decade, about two in five had previous involvement in the criminal justice system.

“Overall, juveniles had minimal recorded criminal history, if they had any at all, prior to being involved in a gun violence incident,” according to the report. 

Researchers found that minors had “a very quick detected criminal trajectory to gun violence,” the report said.

About one in five minors referred for serious violent offenses in 2014 had no previous referrals. That number rose to about half in 2023.

“These observations highlight the need to expand early identification and intervention efforts, especially among school-based and community-based partners,” the report said.

Researchers found that the number of minors referred to the Marion County Juvenile Department decreased over a decade, but the conduct they were accused of grew more violent. 

Juvenile referrals for violent offenses increased from 41 in 2014 to 98 in 2023. Referrals for gun offenses increased during that same period from nine to 21 last year, a 10-year high.

Over half of minors referred to the juvenile department for crimes lived in Salem. 

4. Gang members have also increasingly been involved in shootings

The share of gang and group members involved in shootings has steadily increased from 22% between 2014 and 2018 to 42% in 2021 and 2023%

While only 17% of gun violence during the past decade was motivated by gang conflicts, a large share of shootings involved members of gangs or groups.

The report found at least one in three shootings involved gang members as victims, suspects or both. Researchers estimated that number could be as high as four in five based on incidents where detectives couldn’t determine gang affiliation or identify a suspect.

Almost all active gangs and groups in Marion County are affiliated with Sureños or Norteños,  “with varying levels of organization and formality,” the report said. “These groups have been noted to primarily be involved in narcotics and weapons trafficking, and members also generate criminal profit through thefts, carjackings, and marijuana crimes.”

The most violently active gangs in recent years have been affiliates of the Sureños, with members more often identified as shooting suspects than victims.

Victims and suspects affiliated with gangs and groups were significantly younger than the rest of those involved in shootings, with one in four being 17 or younger and nearly half between the ages of 18 and 24.

“Rather than holding to designated ‘turfs,’ groups are increasingly transient and often engage in gang activity and conflicts in online venues. Conflicts emerging online can often evolve into personal and group-related disputes carried out in physical spaces,” according to the report.

5. Gun violence is largely concentrated in northeast Salem and Woodburn

About 86% of shootings in Marion County occurred in hotspots covering just over 22 square miles, about 2% of the county’s land.

Shootings were consistently clustered in major hotspots in Salem and a smaller hotspot in Woodburn. 

“These gun violence incidents do cluster in Salem, which is the most highly populated city in the county, but it is also important to note that these areas reflect the highest levels of concentrated disadvantage in the county,” the report said. Researchers described such areas having a higher share of households headed by women and those with residents below the poverty line, under 18 years old, receiving public assistance and unemployed.

Researchers’ recommendations 

Salem-area leaders last year started what they 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.

Researchers recommended that such efforts be expanded to communities such as Keizer and Woodburn “due to their level of group/gang involved violence and gun violence crossover with Salem,” the report said. 

“Although gang members may have associations throughout the county, their violent offenses cluster primarily in northeastern areas of Salem. Regional resources should be shared to address this concentration through focused proactive investigations, hot spot patrols, and intentional community engagement,” the report said.

Researchers said in the report that while local “partners” hold regular meetings to share information about gun violence, county officials should consider meeting more frequently and involving all local police agencies.

They said local leaders should directly engage people at the highest risk of being involved in violence by creating regional processes to share information and refer people to outreach and intervention services.

Researchers recommended that school districts and police agencies in Marion County collaborate to identify and intervene in the lives of young people most vulnerable to gang involvement and gun violence.

“Develop consistent risk assessment criteria to be used countywide. Identify regional community-based organizations that specialize in intensive case management with at-risk youth. Create multi-jurisdictional processes that allow the county agencies to make referrals to these (organizations) as at-risk youth are identified,” the report said.

Researchers also advised that local authorities find ways to identify to court employees the highest-risk people and those involved in groups who are arrested for violent crimes “with the goal of immediate intervention to reduce one’s risk of violent victimization or offending.”

Such partnerships could reduce the likelihood that people already involved in the justice system would “reoffend, retaliate or be released back into gang-on-gang conflicts where further violence can occur,” the report said. “Since a large share of victims and suspects have prior felony convictions and previous incarceration, examine regional reentry programs to identify opportunities to expand case management and bolster services for transition.”

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

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