Marion County public safety officials plan new team to address rising gang, youth violence 

Marion County leaders are calling for a multi-agency team to address youth and gang violence, reacting in part to a recent review that found shootings across the county had more than tripled over the past decade.

County Sheriff Nick Hunter said at a public meeting Thursday afternoon that such a team should focus on “everything from mentorship to enforcement.”

County officials envision forming a group similar to an existing Child Abuse Review Team, which includes police, prosecutors, juvenile officials and victim advocates.

They made the suggestion while discussing a county-commissioned report which found that gun violence is impacting a small number of high-risk people facing similar challenges. That would help narrow the team’s focus, with smaller subgroups focused on issues such as investigations, community outreach and youth, according to Marion County Deputy District Attorney Brendan Murphy.

The Marion County Board of Commissioners and several top public safety officials discussed the not-yet-public report at the meeting. Leaders of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office and District Attorney’s Office also addressed the findings ahead of the meeting in written responses to questions from Danielle Bethell, chair of the Marion County Board of Commissioners.

According to those responses, the report confirms community concerns that shootings have been rising not just within Salem city limits but also in nearby cities and unincorporated areas of east Salem such as Hayesville, Four Corners and East Lancaster, where the Marion County Sheriff’s Office responds to reports of violence. The research builds on a smaller-scale report released in 2023 by the Salem Police Department.

Researchers hired by the county found that shootings outside Salem city limits have more than tripled over the past decade, according to a new county report. 

The trend shows teenagers and gang members increasingly involved in gun violence in recent years as shooters, victims or both.

Researchers analyzed shootings in which people were killed or injured between 2014 and 2023. They found that throughout the county, those increased by about 233%. County officials did not provide raw numbers for annual shootings during the meeting or in written responses. 

Marion County Commissioner Colm Willis directed Chief Administrative Officer Jan Fritz not to provide Salem Reporter with a copy of the full report at that meeting because he said county officials still needed to sort out the title of the document.

The sheriff’s office delayed disclosing its findings for several months, providing shifting estimates for when it planned to release its report.

The agency has yet to fulfill a March 24 public records request from Salem Reporter for a copy of the document or provide an estimated date for its public release.

Researchers also analyzed trends in other crimes involving guns such as robberies, though county officials didn’t discuss those findings in detail at the meeting or in their written responses.

At least one in three shootings throughout that decade involved members of gangs or more informal groups. They were involved in 43% of shootings between 2021 and 2023. 

Gun violence over the past decade most impacted Hispanic men between the ages of 18 and 34, though minors were suspects in nearly one-third of shootings in recent years – compared with about 8% between 2014 and 2018. 

Marion County hired the same researchers Salem did for its earlier study – 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.

Researchers found that 69 out of 233 total shootings occurred in unincorporated Marion County. Of those, 46 were in east Salem.

The county’s gun violence is “tightly concentrated among a small number of very high-risk individuals who share a common set of risk factors like group/gang involvement and significant criminal justice history,” the district attorney’s office said in its written responses, quoting the report.

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. 

Teen violence spiked after the pandemic. Marion County Juvenile Director Troy Gregg said at the meeting that kids who were in elementary school during Covid lacked social engagement before being thrust back into schools.

“Then, all of the sudden, it blows up,” Gregg said. “The gangs did a great job of reaching out to the youth, better than we did.”

He said youth gang involvement in Marion County “has not gotten better” since 2023, when the research concluded. “There’s heavy recruiting going on right now.”

Gregg said the community also isn’t giving troubled kids enough options to find belonging outside of gangs.

Covid left many kids seeking a sense of belonging and ending up on the streets, Hunter said at the meeting.

In recent years, he said, there has been an increase of youth violence that escalated from disputes among strangers online.

“Social media has now created a situation where we have people that are fighting battles behind the scenes that don’t know each other, have never met, would not otherwise interact,” he said. “We’re seeing weapons brought into conflict and violence brought into conflict that would’ve not otherwise been there.”

County officials also highlighted the removal of school resource officers from the Salem-Keizer School District in 2021 as a reason for the increased youth violence. Officers were stationed at local high schools and some middle schools, with salaries paid by the school district.

The sheriff’s office wrote in their written responses that the removal of such officers “destroyed relationships, information gathering and sharing, mentorship, early intervention, partnerships, problem solving.”

Bethell, who was on the Salem-Keizer School Board at the time of the removal, at the meeting recalled a time district leaders convened a group of students of color from all district high schools to speak with law enforcement and service providers about school resource officers. She said the group recommended such officers stay in schools after concluding that they were a valuable tool for building relationships with students having challenges.

“The superintendent ignored that recommendation,” she said. “It’s a massive loss of eyes on kids.”

Gregg said his agency has seen a recklessness in recent gang conflicts among teens that is unprecedented in the Salem area – even compared with the 1990s, when local leaders declared gang violence a significant problem.

He said that’s partly driven by older gang mentors who were formerly in the juvenile system and “the intensity of what they’re asking for,” as well as stunted maturity due to Covid.

Gregg said younger and younger kids are also increasingly engaged in serious violence. Last year, an 11-year-old boy was arrested in Woodburn, accused of attempting to kill one boy and shooting at another in a gang-related incident.

Bethell recalled speaking with the boy while touring the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center last year. “I left there feeling very much like he was not necessarily aware of the manipulation he had been a victim of by his older peers,” she said.

Murphy said at the meeting that gangs reward the ability to place fear in people through “arbitrary, significant violence.”

“The more violent you are, the more authority you have in that community” he said. 

The district attorney’s office wrote that a recent change in Oregon’s juvenile justice laws contributed to to the increased involvement of minors in shootings.

For over two decades in Oregon, offenders ages 15-17 who were charged with violent felonies such as murder or rape were automatically prosecuted and sentenced as adults. After turning 25, those with time left in their sentence would be moved from juvenile facilities to a state prison. 

But as of 2019, prosecutors now have to prove to judges through a legal process called “waiver” that trying a teen in the juvenile system wouldn’t benefit them or society. Otherwise, minors who commit even the most serious offenses must be released by the time they turn 25.

Only three minors in Oregon have since been waived into adult court through that process. Murphy said it’s “probably the most complicated legal procedure” prosecutors use under Oregon law and essentially requires them to “prove a unicorn committed a shooting.”

Marion County District Attorney Paige Clarkson recalled one case of a large group of young people caught on Ring camera video planning a shooting. The older ones, she said, told their younger peers that they need to “do this now” before they turn 18, when they’d be sent to prison instead of a youth correctional facility.

“Frankly, some agency policies act directly contrary to local public safety,” the district attorney’s office wrote.

Murphy said since 2021, the district attorney’s office has prosecuted around 11 minors in juvenile court for firearm offenses. Of those, over half were being supervised by the Oregon Youth Authority, the state’s juvenile justice agency.

“We have to figure out a way of making sure that when they have that contact with the criminal justice system, it leads to meaningful change,” he said.

Clarkson said one “really good example” of the problem was Bobby Brown, a 16-year-old boy who in July 2022 died in a shootout with Salem police officers who were trying to arrest him for his involvement in two downtown shootings. At the time of the shootings, Brown was on juvenile parole and on the run from state authorities.

The problem goes beyond youth. The study found that nearly three in four people involved in shooting that left people dead or wounded had previous involvement in the criminal justice system.

The study’s findings echoed those of the city’s report released in November 2023, which showed that shootings in Salem city limits had doubled and serious assaults involving teenagers had tripled in recent years. The city report focused on a five-year period.

Following that report, Salem police and the Marion County Sheriff’s Office assigned overtime work this past summer to ramp up vehicle and foot patrols in parts of Salem most vulnerable to violence. Hunter said his agency will continue those summer patrols.

Police spent more time last summer proactively checking in with minors on parole and probation who were at high risk for violence, as well as their families. 

Juvenile authorities also teamed up with the Oregon State Police last summer at the Oregon State Fair. They saw kids they recognized and there were fewer fights than in previous years, Gregg said.

The district attorney’s office recently shifted its prosecutors from other focuses, such as domestic violence and child abuse, to create a team focused on firearms and gangs.

Researchers recommended that local leaders address high-risk groups and gangs, work directly with the most vulnerable people and boost agency collaboration and information-sharing, according to a written response by the district attorney’s office to Bethell’s questions ahead of the meeting.

Murphy said a team focused on gun violence would allow for better communication between agencies. He said such a team would be most effective if led by the district attorney’s office since it works closely with several agencies and has a broad view of public safety issues across the county.

The district attorney’s office wrote that county officials need to create a three-to five-year plan for the team. It should identify funding opportunities and legislative advocacy to change state policy on issues affecting gun violence, such as the juvenile waiver law and “meaningful intervention/support/supervision” for high-risk offenders already involved in the justice system, the office wrote.

Bethell said they would need a few community organizations to join the group who could focus on preventing violence through mentorship.

Marion County is lacking organizations that mentor kids before they become involved in the justice system, according to Hunter.

The sheriff said his agency is considering expanding its Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program – intended to keep people struggling with homelessness and addiction out of the criminal justice system – to include youth. 

“We’ve got a lot of juveniles that are addicted and a lot of behaviors that are following that addiction,” he said. 

“Some parents at this point are throwing their hands up. It’s not that they don’t want to parent – they don’t know what to do anymore. So, this is leading to us having these juveniles on the streets, and then their mentorship is not coming from a positive place,” he said. “The further they walk down the road, the harder it is going to be for us to get them back.”

Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: ardeshir@salemreporter.com or 503-929-3053.

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