A year after Fayetteville Police Chief Kemberle Braden declared that the “sanctity of life is no longer sacred” in Fayetteville amid a record-breaking number of homicides in the city, things appear to be reversing.
At Monday’s Fayetteville City Council meeting, Braden reported homicides have been cut by more than half compared to this time last year. The Fayetteville Police Department recorded 12 homicides in the first half of this year, compared to 28 halfway through 2023. That’s a 57.1% decrease.
Two of those homicides, he said, included the Deven children, who were last seen alive in 2019 and 2022, but whose remains were found this year, technically putting the total number of 2024 homicides at 10.
Similarly, rates of other violent crime have plummeted in the first half of the year compared to last year: aggravated assault has dropped by 34.5% and the number of reported rapes has gone down by 39.5%. The reduction of violent crime in Fayetteville follows national trends after an uptick during the pandemic.
Braden said he could not attribute the drop in violent crime to any single factor, but the change was a “culmination of many, many things,” including increased monitoring of drug robberies associated with homicides, high clearance rates for murder and the department’s partnership with The Phoenix Center, a domestic violence support center located on Ramsey Street.
“I believe there’s no one single event that we can put our finger on,” Braden told council members during his quarterly report on Monday. “Just having that focus on violent crime, truly looking at numbers, truly partnering with other people outside of the police department to have that focus and to bring that attention to the streets.”
Council members praised the drop in violent crime and thanked the police department and Braden for their efforts.
“We are the sixth largest city in North Carolina, and if you talk about Fayetteville to people in North Carolina, you would think that we have the highest crime rate, that we have this and we have that,” Mayor Pro Tem Kathy Jensen said. “But I want to [say], for the record to know, that there are many cities that their crime rate isn’t going down like ours is, and that they are still doing things and we are making a difference.”
Despite strides in reducing violent crime, crime overall is slightly up, Braden said — an increase of 0.8% in the total index from January to June year over year. This can be mostly attributed to the rise in property crime, particularly an uptick in motor vehicle theft, which has increased 32%. Braden noted there had been a steep increase in juveniles committing this crime, with 47 car thefts in the first half of this year, compared to 53 during all of last year, among adolescents.
ShotSpotter
It’s been 11 months since the police department initiated a pilot program for ShotSpotter, also known as SoundThinking, the controversial gunshot detection technology that uses sensors to track gunfire in three high gun violence locations in the city. The city’s one-year contract with ShotSpotter cost nearly $200,000, an expense which some critics have argued is not worth the cost given ShotSpotter’s poor reputation in other cities, including its potential for racial bias and inaccurate results.
Braden only presented a few numbers on the technology at Monday’s presentation. The data, collected from January to June, showed only five arrests made and five guns recovered from use of ShotSpotter. The statistics also included that the technology had detected 591 shots, and the highest number of alerts had come from the Campbellton neighborhood in the Murchison Road corridor.
Council Member Malik Davis raised concerns about the limited data Braden presented Monday.
“So how do you feel that your team is using, utilizing [ShotSpotter], and how effective is it?” Davis asked Braden. “Because I don’t see a lot of stats on there, which I’m very sad about, because if a community is asking for it, I think it’s needed.”
Braden maintained it had been a helpful tool for police to develop leads that connect various incidents to each other.
“The evidence based [upon the tool], and the leads that we’re able to generate with it, has led us to some great success,” Braden said.
“I just look forward to more information,” Davis replied.
Traffic stops
Another area of contention was racial disparities in the police department’s traffic stop statistics that Braden presented Monday. According to the latest data, which Braden acknowledged largely follows past trends for the department, Black drivers constituted 64% of traffic stops, while white drivers made up 32% of stops. About 39% of Fayetteville’s population is white and about 42% is Black.
Council Member Mario Benavente and Braden — who have had heated exchanges during council meetings about the disparities — spent a portion of Monday’s meeting discussing the traffic stop statistics. Benavente again questioned why Black drivers were stopped disproportionately more than white drivers, to which Braden responded “race is not a consideration for a traffic stop,” instead arguing that an officer has to have probable cause for making a stop.
Benavente previously made a motion in late February to have one of the council’s committees take a closer look at the issue of racial disparities in traffic stops, following Braden’s presentation of total numbers for 2023. The council denied the motion at the time, voting 7-3 against it.
At Monday’s meeting, Benavente again implored the council to take action to reduce the disparities, noting that Braden shouldn’t be entirely responsible for addressing the issue.
“There’s a certain point [where] we have to address that, and I think it’s high time that we do that rather than just saying to everyone that everything is fine, don’t look over behind the curtain,” he said.
Mayor Mitch Colvin said higher rates of poverty among Black and brown communities is likely a contributing factor to the racial disparities seen in traffic stops. According to the US Census Bureau, about 23.8% of Black people in Fayetteville live in poverty, compared to 12.2% of white people.
“You don’t just stop people for speeding, because that’s a choice to speed,” Colvin said. “So what may trigger a stop may be broken tail lights, expired tags … So I want to make sure that we understand that there’s an economic disparity that you can’t ignore, that causes some of these other things.”
Contact Evey Weisblat at eweisblat@cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608. This story was made possible by donations from readers like you to CityView News Fund, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization committed to an informed democracy in Fayetteville and Cumberland County.
