As police sped toward West San Jose on Wednesday night where Homer Bejarano Resendez lay fatally shot, the city of San Jose was accelerating through one of its bloodiest stretches in years.
After a January during which there wasn't a single slaying, there have now been 12 homicides in less than seven weeks - three this week. That's twice as many killings so far this year compared with the same period last year.
There were 36 homicide victims overall in 2007 - a 10-year high. Sixteen of them were gang slayings - mostly casualties of the ongoing skirmishes between Norteños and Sureño-affiliated street gangs. Five of this year's slayings have known gang connections, police said.
While some experts said a dozen deaths in less than two months would be a statistic most big cities would envy, Mayor Chuck Reed told the Mercury News he was concerned.
"I'm worried about it," said Reed, who has scheduled Police Chief Rob Davis to report about the rise in homicides at a city council meeting April 8. "We can't take comfort in the fact that we are not as a bad as 'fill in the blank.' "
Reed pointed out that last year he increased funding for the Mayor's Gang Prevention Task Force by $1 million and recently asked the council to add the same amount annually.
But he admitted that the streets of San Jose had grown tense with the recent violence.
"I've talked to other mayors, and we know Norteños and Sureños have this
battle going around the state," he said. "Gang-prevention workers are even afraid to go out there sometimes."
Mario Maciel, the newly appointed head of the Mayor's Gang Prevention Task Force, agreed. "Things are hot out there."
And the violence, he suspected, can partly be attributed to the ongoing push-back of the Norteños - the historically dominant red-clad street gang in San Jose - against a surge of Sureños in blue moving into and around the city.
"The Norteños are sending a message that 'you are in Northern California,' " Maciel said.
But police say there is little "theme" to the slayings this year.
While homicides are up, overall gang violence is trending flat or downward over the past half year, according to Lt. Rikki Goede, who heads the department's Gang Investigations Unit. Even the gang fights, shootings and stabbings through this year so far are down from the same time last year, she said. And investigators were not finding any discernible pattern in the bloodshed.
"There's not a connect-the-dots thing right now," said Assistant Chief Dan Katz. "Definitely, we are concerned. This is a significant change from last year. But we are not seeing a trend. A lot of these are random encounters on the street turning into a spontaneous act of violence."
And the killings are keeping homicide investigators busy; so far, they've made three arrests.
In the past, SJPD and the Mayor's Gang Task Force have held emergency meetings to deal with spikes in gang violence, flooding neighborhoods with cops and gang intervention workers. No such meetings are planned after the death of Resendez. Police said they do not know if his was a gang-related homicide.
By comparison, Oakland has had 32 homicides so far this year, up 13; Sacramento has had 10, down one. San Francisco has had 20, but did not immediately have a comparison with last year.
Franklin Zimring, a law professor at University of California-Berkeley and an expert of crime statistics and trends, scoffed at drawing any hard conclusions based on such a comparatively small number over such a short period of time.
"San Jose has an extremely low homicide rate - even this year - by Bay Area standards," Zimring said, "There are no indications in this small collection of cases that there has been any real trend."
Wes McBride, the executive director of the California Gang Investigators' Association, said he was asked Thursday in a conference in Las Vegas what was different in the state's gang landscape from 30 years ago.
Not a thing, McBride said he told them. Gang violence comes and goes in cycles.
"It'll never go away," McBride said. "Gang-related violence tends to be a problem-solving technique. They don't do sensitivity training. They kill the problem and they don't have a problem anymore."
After a January during which there wasn't a single slaying, there have now been 12 homicides in less than seven weeks - three this week. That's twice as many killings so far this year compared with the same period last year.
There were 36 homicide victims overall in 2007 - a 10-year high. Sixteen of them were gang slayings - mostly casualties of the ongoing skirmishes between Norteños and Sureño-affiliated street gangs. Five of this year's slayings have known gang connections, police said.
While some experts said a dozen deaths in less than two months would be a statistic most big cities would envy, Mayor Chuck Reed told the Mercury News he was concerned.
"I'm worried about it," said Reed, who has scheduled Police Chief Rob Davis to report about the rise in homicides at a city council meeting April 8. "We can't take comfort in the fact that we are not as a bad as 'fill in the blank.' "
Reed pointed out that last year he increased funding for the Mayor's Gang Prevention Task Force by $1 million and recently asked the council to add the same amount annually.
But he admitted that the streets of San Jose had grown tense with the recent violence.
"I've talked to other mayors, and we know Norteños and Sureños have this
battle going around the state," he said. "Gang-prevention workers are even afraid to go out there sometimes."
Mario Maciel, the newly appointed head of the Mayor's Gang Prevention Task Force, agreed. "Things are hot out there."
And the violence, he suspected, can partly be attributed to the ongoing push-back of the Norteños - the historically dominant red-clad street gang in San Jose - against a surge of Sureños in blue moving into and around the city.
"The Norteños are sending a message that 'you are in Northern California,' " Maciel said.
But police say there is little "theme" to the slayings this year.
While homicides are up, overall gang violence is trending flat or downward over the past half year, according to Lt. Rikki Goede, who heads the department's Gang Investigations Unit. Even the gang fights, shootings and stabbings through this year so far are down from the same time last year, she said. And investigators were not finding any discernible pattern in the bloodshed.
"There's not a connect-the-dots thing right now," said Assistant Chief Dan Katz. "Definitely, we are concerned. This is a significant change from last year. But we are not seeing a trend. A lot of these are random encounters on the street turning into a spontaneous act of violence."
And the killings are keeping homicide investigators busy; so far, they've made three arrests.
In the past, SJPD and the Mayor's Gang Task Force have held emergency meetings to deal with spikes in gang violence, flooding neighborhoods with cops and gang intervention workers. No such meetings are planned after the death of Resendez. Police said they do not know if his was a gang-related homicide.
By comparison, Oakland has had 32 homicides so far this year, up 13; Sacramento has had 10, down one. San Francisco has had 20, but did not immediately have a comparison with last year.
Franklin Zimring, a law professor at University of California-Berkeley and an expert of crime statistics and trends, scoffed at drawing any hard conclusions based on such a comparatively small number over such a short period of time.
"San Jose has an extremely low homicide rate - even this year - by Bay Area standards," Zimring said, "There are no indications in this small collection of cases that there has been any real trend."
Wes McBride, the executive director of the California Gang Investigators' Association, said he was asked Thursday in a conference in Las Vegas what was different in the state's gang landscape from 30 years ago.
Not a thing, McBride said he told them. Gang violence comes and goes in cycles.
"It'll never go away," McBride said. "Gang-related violence tends to be a problem-solving technique. They don't do sensitivity training. They kill the problem and they don't have a problem anymore."
