City of Tacoma has directed millions to preventing youth violence. Is it working?
Spates of gun violence among teenagers continue to afflict Tacoma, with the most recent uptick in shootings last month leaving a 15-year-old dead and another teen wounded not far from a high school.
The shootings are a symptom of the larger problem of youth violence, which surged in the city last year when three teenagers became victims of homicide. Mayor Victoria Woodards said in her 2023 State of the City address that the level of violence was unacceptable. Tacoma Public Schools Superintendent Joshua Garcia appeared before a U.S. Senate committee last summer to testify about students' worsening mental health, testifying that 10 students in his district had been shot in the last year.
The News Tribune with the nonprofit Safe Streets brought together a panel of experts last year to discuss how factors such as poverty, lack of hope and intergenerational incarceration were driving youth violence and what various organizations are doing to make Tacoma safer for young people.
But so far this year Tacoma has already matched the three teen homicides that occurred in 2023. The first was a 16-year-old shot in the head in January on Portland Avenue, allegedly by a 15-year-old boy. The second was a 17-year-old girl gunned down in March by her ex-boyfriend outside her home. The latest was last month when another 15-year-old was fatally shot in the Eastside neighborhood.
Four people in the 19-29 age group have died by homicide in 2024, one fewer than the number of killings recorded for the group by this time last year. The perpetrators have largely been other teenagers, though one teen homicide from last year remains unsolved .
It's not just a Tacoma problem. According to The Wall Street Journal, homicides committed by juveniles acting alone in the United States rose 30 percent in 2020 from the previous year, and killings committed by multiple juveniles increased 66 percent.
So what is the City of Tacoma doing to stop more rashes of teen gun violence?
In recent years, the city has significantly beefed up the number of service providers it contracts with to prevent youth violence and has directed more funding to them. In 2023 and 2024, nearly $4.4 million was allocated from various funding sources to 25 agencies that provide programming to combat youth violence and increase opportunities for young people to thrive.
Before 2021, the city had just one service provider working to reduce and prevent youth violence, and it was reaching just over a dozen children. According to Vicky McLaurin, who oversees contracts in the city's Neighborhood and Community Services Department, that meant that in many cases, the city wasn't reaching youth before they became involved in criminal activity.
"I was here at one point where a lot of the youth in our program were the ones involved in the shootings," McLaurin said. "I can remember those, and I'm not hearing that right now."
The city is also pursuing a more comprehensive approach to violence reduction by redefining which programs are considered part of efforts to reduce youth violence.
Previously, youth services related to behavioral health, education, youth development, violence reduction and commercial sexual exploitation of children were broken into several funding buckets.
Next year, those services will be consolidated under one initiative, called BRAVE — Building Resilience Against Violence and Exploitation. The rebrand was done in April and is how the initiative will be organized for the 2025-2026 budget period.
The change means that the different contracted service providers will be part of the city's Multidisciplinary Intervention Team, which meets monthly and works on case management for people in its programs.
"So I might be working with this person, but they would work better with you, or maybe you have services that that person needs that I don't have," McLaurin said of the team. "So we case manage together: how can we help this individual?"
What does data on youth violence tell us?
Ask McLaurin if youth violence was worse than ever last year, and she'll tell you it's difficult to tell, but she doesn't think so.
"There's sometimes when it feels like that it's really, really bad," McLaurin said. "We saw that on the Eastside where there was a lot of shootings, and there was young people being shot, and then it gets quiet. It just ebbs and flows."
How much of a dent local efforts to reduce youth violence are putting in the number of shootings, fights and other forms of violence that young people experience in Tacoma can be hard to see. Homicide counts are bleak, but they represent the most extreme form of youth violence. Getting an idea of the true state of the problem in Tacoma requires a broader analysis.
The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department's 2022 Youth Violence Assessment is one helpful resource. It found that from 2016 to 2019, hospitalizations for injury assaults among people under age 30 in Tacoma occurred at a rate of 26 per 100,000 hospitalizations. The most common injury was from firearms.
The study also looked at how lethal assault rates have changed from 2007 to 2020. Using five-year rates of assault deaths per 100,000 for people under 30 in Tacoma, it showed that for the most part, the rate of deadly assaults steadily increased from 2007 to 2016. They reached a peak in the years 2012 to 2016 at a rate of 6.69 per 100,000.
Data on youth assaults in Tacoma after 2021 is less readily available, and, according to McLaurin, a similar assessment isn't expected for years. McLaurin said an assessment was done in 2019, but the assessor looked more closely at the city's model for preventing youth violence, rather than the issue itself. She said that was why a new assessment was completed in 2022, and further studies would probably be done every five years.
According to Police Department data, so far this year calls for service related to problems with people under age 18 are down about 5 percent compared to the same time period last year.
Those calls, which get labeled "incorrigible juvenile" or "juvenile problem", aren't necessarily for crimes, according to Officer Shelbie Boyd, a Police Department spokesperson. She said some can be a school or parent calling to ask for help dealing with an unruly child, or an officer broadcasting over police radio that they're seeing the same group of kids smoking in an alley outside school again. When officers do respond, arrests are rare, the data shows, and Boyd says officers are more often showing up to talk to the child or connect them to resources.
There also has been a decrease in reports of weapons found in schools, according to police. Seven reports have been made in 2024, compared to 11 during the same time period last year, a reversal from years of increases since the COVID-19 pandemic. The News Tribune made multiple attempts to talk to Tacoma Public Schools for this story, but no one from the district responded.
Although those aren't reports of violent crimes, Boyd said she's optimistic it's a sign that issues with juveniles are getting better rather than worse.
"Maybe it's more just me hoping that they are as a mom, right? I don't want there to be juvenile issues. Every single kid I contact, it brings it home for me," Boyd said.
"I see all of the different programs that not just the city but the county is really putting out there for kids, making them accessible ... I just think that the holistic approach to all of this stuff related to juveniles, yeah, I believe it's making an impact," she added.
How successful are city-funded programs?
The city doesn't measure the success of its efforts in terms of crime reports and shootings. It wants to help young people before they become entwined in the criminal justice system, so it measures success in terms of how many at-risk youth have been served.
The target population is people between ages 13 and 19, but the city's service providers work with anyone ages 12 to 30, with extra focus on neighborhoods in Hilltop, Eastside and west of the Tacoma Mall. South Tacoma will be added as a priority in 2025, specifically the Hosmer area.
Programming seeks to benefit young people identified as being at highest risk of becoming victims or perpetrators of violence, which includes youth of color, specifically young Black men, and LGBTQ people.
When McLaurin started working for the city in 2016, she said they had a goal of serving 15 people. Last year, more than 6,500 individuals were served through youth and young adult violence-reduction programs. McLaurin said it's not just young people benefiting, it's their families.
One particularly successful program has been Summer Teen Late Nights, which provides supervised spaces for young people to spend evenings during the summer months where they can get a meal and meet other kids, play basketball or just hang out.
The program came together quickly last year, and in 2024 it expanded from weeknights only to include weekends at 12 locations, a mix of community centers and schools. Participants could even get free tickets to a Rainiers baseball game at Cheney Stadium.
Last year the city tallied 10,000 participants in Late Nights, including individuals who used the program multiple times. McLaurin said that's 10,000 kids not out in the street that the city didn't have to worry about. Part of what made the program successful is its simplicity, according to McLaurin.
"What is old is new. I think what made it work is that children, they wanted somewhere to go," McLaurin said. "If you give them somewhere to go, something to do, they'll typically, you know, we're gonna see some positive results."
Even with school back in session, youth violence has persisted in Tacoma during the last months of the year. Late last month, a 16-year-old boy was wounded in a shooting about a block from Lincoln High School. A 14-year-old boy has been charged with first-degree assault for the incident, which allegedly stemmed from a petty dispute that led to a fight, then gunfire.
No one under age 21 is allowed to purchase a handgun in Washington state, but that hasn't stopped young people from obtaining them. According to the Youth Violence Assessment, about 10 percent of Tacoma Public School students surveyed in 2021 said they thought it would be easy to access a gun.
Police Chief Avery Moore said last year that many firearms used by young people in violent crimes are stolen from vehicles, and the department reported that a gun was stolen out of a vehicle in Tacoma every 48 hours. According to Police Department data, reports of thefts from vehicles in general this year are unchanged compared to last year.
Detective William Muse, a Police Department spokesperson, told The News Tribune that gun owners have a responsibility to keep their weapons secure in a safe. Washington is one of 28 states where it is illegal to negligently store firearms, according to a 2024 study by the RAND Corporation. Muse said parents who possess guns should take time to sit down with their children to talk about gun safety.
"There's no good outcome to a juvenile being in possession of a firearm," Muse said.
