Most homicides in Durham, North Carolina were the product of black-on-black crime

Ray Gronberg:

Durham's murder rate remains a blot on the city's reputation, and to combat it civic leaders need to crack down on gun crimes, boost mentoring and drug-treatment programs, and help youth and ex-convicts find work, Mayor Bill Bell said Tuesday.

To make progress on all four fronts, city officials will have to forge stronger partnerships with the county government, the Durham County Sheriff's Office, prosecutors and other agencies, Bell said during his fourth annual "state of the city" address.

The city may also have to hire an outside consultant to compare the city's crime-fighting programs to those of other communities, offering "cutting-edge best practices recommendations" and helping officials to implement them, Bell said.

Bell added that the thing he found most disturbing about last year's 37 homicides was the fact that most were the product of black-on-black crime.

"It is common knowledge that as African-Americans, we are vastly overrepresented in the prison and jail populations in proportion to our representation in the overall population," Bell said. "But we can't blame injustice or lack of representation on the fact that we as a race are committing murders far out of proportion to how we are represented in the city of Durham."

Blacks constitute about 43 percent of the city's population but were allegedly responsible for more than 80 percent of last year's homicides, Bell said, adding that no matter where they live, all the city's residents have a stake in addressing the problem.

"That figure is not about justice or injustice," he said. "It is about knowingly doing wrong, committing one of the ultimate crimes and violating one of the Ten Commandments."

Bell's speech followed a violent stretch in the life of the city that began in early November with the death in a drive-by shooting of the son of a prominent critic of the Durham Public Schools. In the weeks since, police have been called on to investigate a quadruple homicide they say stemmed from a drug robbery, a shooting death outside Northgate Mall and a nonfatal shooting on a Durham Area Transit Authority bus. The victims and known suspects in each of those cases were black.

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