SKYWAY — King County will create a new Regional Office of Gun Violence Prevention, County Executive Dow Constantine announced Tuesday, an effort to stanch recent increases in shootings and killings, especially in South King County.
The new office will expand violence intervention services already underway, and open new hubs in Kent, Burien and Skyway next year, Constantine said. It also will work with federal agencies to try to get additional resources and funding to combat gun violence.
President Joe Biden last month established the first federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which aims to coordinate efforts and help distribute billions of dollars in federal funding included in the gun-safety legislation passed by Congress in the wake of last year’s mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
Locally, much of the work occurs under a program called the Regional Peacekeepers Collective. It involves a network of community groups, coordinated and funded in part by the county, that work to connect with those seen as most likely to perpetrate gun violence, especially those who have been victims themselves. They try to intercept those people, in large part young men of color, to connect them with education, jobs and services as a means to forestall violence.
“The goal is to make more of us than there are them, to turn them into us,” said Dominique Davis, founder and CEO of Community Passageways, one of the groups leading intervention efforts. “When we ask these guys to put the guns down, we’ve got to give them something.”
“I boil it down to economics. If I know I’m making good money, I’m not going to go out and shoot anybody.”
At the county-owned Harborview Medical Center, staff and social workers are working to connect gunshot victims to services — social workers, counseling, mentorship, job training, housing assistance — before they even leave the hospital, hoping to stop cycles of violence.
The sheriff also has a dedicated gun violence prevention unit, with slots for five officers when fully staffed.
The new office will be housed under the auspices of Public Health — Seattle & King County. It will have an annual budget of about $6.75 million and five staff members, said Eleuthera Lisch, who has been leading gun violence prevention efforts for Public Health and will be the new office’s director. The funding consists largely of money already in the county budget for similar efforts that will be shifted to the new office.
The shift comes as local homicide numbers continue to rise. There have been 61 killings in Seattle this year, a figure that already has surpassed the city’s 2022 tally, according to a Seattle Times database compiled with preliminary information from police, prosecutors and the Medical Examiner’s Office.
Seattle police investigated 33 homicides in 2019, 53 in 2020, 41 in 2021 and 54 in 2022, according to The Times’ data.
There have been an additional 16 homicides this year in cities and unincorporated areas of King County served by the county sheriff’s office as well as 469 crimes involving guns, Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall said Tuesday.
So far this year, King County prosecutors have responded to the scenes of 135 suspected or possible homicides, although that number also includes cases that were later determined to be suicides.
Shootings are not distributed evenly, but rather are concentrated in the southern part of the county. The prosecutor’s office collects data from 20 county law enforcement agencies. More than 90 percent of shootings come from just eight of those agencies — the two largest, the Seattle Police Department and the county sheriff, and six South King County cities: Renton, Tukwila, Auburn, Federal Way, Kent and Des Moines.
About 80 percent of shooting victims in the second quarter of this year were people of color, according to the prosecutor’s office, 89 percent were male and 58 percent were under age 30.
Constantine, as he announced the new office, ticked off several of the most recent high-profile shootings and killings.
In July, five people were shot in a Rainier Beach Safeway parking lot, the very spot where gun violence prevention teams gather to try to intervene in the lives of those most at risk of violence. In August, three people were killed and six injured in a shooting at a South Seattle hookah lounge. Two weeks ago, one person was shot and killed while aboard a King County Metro bus in White Center. And just on Monday, a man was shot in Seattle’s Central District, with bullets shattering the front windows of a child care center.
“For the first time in history, gun violence is the leading case of death for children and teens in our country,” Constantine said. “It’s heartbreaking, it’s tragic, it’s also outrageous and unacceptable.”
Alicia Dassa’s son was shot and killed in front of their Rainier Beach home in 2020, a killing that remains unsolved.
She recently started the first Washington chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, a peer support group, but also a way to connect families with counselors, attorneys and other services.
“I have been served in my community by almost every organization standing behind us,” Dassa said Tuesday. “And the declaration that’s being made today is a promise to back all these organizations, and hopefully including ours, is huge.”
