First eight months of 2016 had second-most 'shots fired' reports of past five years

The year 2016 saw 211 reports of shots fired from Jan. 1 to Aug. 1, the second-highest number of incidences for the same period of every year from 2012. Only 2015 was higher, with 226 police reports that included evidence or eyewitness reports of gunshots.

The figures came in the latest SeaStat crime reports, presented at an Aug. 25 meeting of the East Precinct Police Advisory Council.

The gap was even narrower when it came to the number of victims of gun violence. Between Jan. 1 and Aug. 1, the year 2016 saw 35 gun-related injuries, compared to 45 for the same period in 2015.

But 2016 has seen more gun-related deaths, with seven fatalities this year versus six in 2015.

Only one day later, 2016 saw its eighth gun violence death with the Aug. 2 killing of Trina Bolar in her home in Madison Valley.

The four weeks from July 5 to Aug. 1 saw nearly three dozen reports of shots fired city wide. The Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct saw more shots fired reports than any other precinct, most of which were concentrated in the Yesler area of the Central District. More than half of the East Precinct shots fired reports occurred in a single week at the end of July. Only one shots fired report came out of Madison Park during this period.

East Precinct Captain Paul McDonagh noted that in most of these reports, guns were being introduced into a dispute between personal acquaintances — such as domestic violence cases or arguments between a person’s current lover and an ex-lover, he said.

“You want to have a disagreement, that’s fine,” McDonagh said. “But guns aren’t the answer.”

On National Gun Violence Day, June 2, Seattle City Council members unveiled an initiative to install so-called ShotSpotter gunshot detection technology in the Central District and Rainier Valley. The system uses microphones to alert police when it detects a sonic boom, like that produced by a gunshot, and triangulate the noise to its location.

Critics of ShotSpotter have pointed to the potential for microphones to be used to invade privacy, even unintentionally.

“I have several concerns about the situation,” Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley wrote on the American Civil Liberties Union’s blog in May 2015, after interviewing ShotSpotter CEO Ralph Clark. “The biggest may be that audio from live microphones is stored for days. Storage of any data always raises the specter of security vulnerabilities, and we just don’t know what uses or abuses of such data may emerge down the road.”

Felicia Cross, a member of the police advisory council and chair of the African American Community Advisory Council, was able to meet with ShotSpotter representatives at a law enforcement conference in Washington D.C. earlier this summer. Cross said she thought their presentation was “very impressive” and that her reservations about ShotSpotter had been assuaged.

“I think the more educated we are about the system itself, the more we’ll be willing to accept it,” she said.

Area tax preparer Frankie Flight counted herself among the supporters of the ShotSpotter program after losing her grandmother over the summer. Flight and 96-year-old Frankie Mae Fisher were sleeping in the living room of Fisher’s home in the 900 block of 27th Avenue after midnight on June 27 when the sounds of gunfire and Fisher’s screams woke Flight. Flight discovered later that morning that Fisher had sustained a gunshot wound to the leg.

Fisher died three weeks later due to medical complications related to the wound, according to the King County Medical Examiner’s report [“96-year-old grandmother dies month after Central area shooting,” Capitol Hill Times, July 29, 2016].

“It’s almost like we need something right now,” Flight said. “I’m not saying [ShotSpotter] would have saved my grandmother’s life, but we need something.”