Sacramento gang workers say the potential for violence is more common in the summer, and that they had been working to 'get out ahead' of trouble.
As police, policymakers and family members of victims continued to grapple with a deadly shootout in downtown Sacramento Sunday that left six dead and 12 injured, gang intervention experts in the city said the explosion of violence appeared to have sprung up with little warning.
In a statement, police said it was “increasingly clear that gang violence is at the center of this tragedy.” Police have not named the gangs they believe were involved or given a motive for the hail of gunfire. “You had one active gang group, the Crips,” said Mervin Brookins, who co-founded Brother 2 Brother, a violence intervention program in the neighborhood where one of the victims came from. “And you had some older guys that used to be Bloods,” he said. “It wasn’t motivated by one gang having beef with the other gang.”
Before the pandemic, he points out, Sacramento went 28 months without a minor being killed. Now, he said, there is a need to “double down” on community aid programs to reach at-risk boys and men. But — chiming in from the other side of California’s contentious battle over criminal justice reform — many Republicans and law enforcement advocates held a news conference Thursday to argue that what is really needed is stiffer sentences for gun and gang crimes and an end to early release from prison.
Police say that 27-year-old Smiley Martin III — the brother of Dandrae Martin — had a gun at the scene, but he has yet to be charged. He will be booked at Sacramento County Main Jail on suspicion of “possession of a firearm by a prohibitive person and possession of a machine gun” as soon as he gets out of the hospital. Smiley Martin was shot during the barrage. Police and court records show he has a lengthy violent crime record stretching back nearly a decade.
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