Lexington’s homicides were nearly cut in half in 2023. Why and what comes next?
From 2019 to 2022, Lexington set and re-set its homicide record for four straight years.
That stopped in 2023.
The city reported 24 homicides last year, far fewer than the record-setting mark of 44 the year prior. The last time Lexington reported 24 or fewer homicides in a year was in 2018, according to data from the Lexington Police Department, which dates back to 2008.
In the past 10 years, the city has reported 24 or fewer homicides only three times, according to Lexington police records.
Devine Carama, the director of ONE Lexington who has taken on several roles as a community activist and is also a hip-hop artist, said as communities emerge from the pandemic, rates of violent crime are dropping nationwide. He also credited the community for having a desire to solve the problem.
“I think everybody at their core wanted to see better days, better time, a safer community,” said Carama, who leads the advocacy group that specializes in addressing root gun violence problems among youth, which was established in 2017. Carama was named the director of the group in 2021. “We just needed the opportunity to do so, and we were blessed to facilitate that opportunity.”
Homicide rates have dropped significantly across the United States in cities similar in size to Lexington. Homicide rates in cities of all sizes were lower through the third quarter of 2023 compared to the third quarter of 2022, according to the FBI. Cities with a population between 250,000 and 499,999 saw a decrease in homicide rates of more than 20%.
The percentage of violent crime also dropped about 10% in cities with that population size, according to FBI data.
Lexington saw a drop in non-fatal shootings, too. The city reported consecutive years of more than 100 assaults with firearms in 2021 and 2022, but reported 84 such incidents in 2022.
In an interview with the Herald-Leader, Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers acknowledged progress is being made, but said he wants to work toward getting the city to eliminate homicides.
“I’m always going to expect it to be zero,” Weathers said. “To me, that’s the progress I look for.”
While violent crime has trended lower nationwide, Lexington leaders say specific steps taken by the city — and the community — resulted in Lexington’s significant reduction in shootings and other types of violent crime.
‘Everybody ... wanted to see better’
Carama pointed to team efforts from law enforcement and community partners as contributing factors for Lexington’s steep drop-off in homicides.
“The last couple of years, we have seen the faith community, we’ve seen city government, we’ve seen public safety, even the school system, non-profit sector, not only communicating with one another but actually collaborating,” Carama said. “The more that we are connected, it shrinks the gaps that normally our most vulnerable tend to fall through.”
Weathers said ONE Lexington has done a good job of involving community partners outside the government in the city’s strategic plan to combat gun violence. The agency, which is part of Mayor Linda Gorton’s office, worked to administer grants to grassroots nonprofit organizations that contribute to the effort of violence prevention.
In 2023, ONE Lexington also helped with family resource and youth service center violence prevention donations, aided in the “It Takes a Village” summer youth and in-school mentoring programs, did a symposium on youth and young adult gun violence, offered re-entry support and provided youth and young adult conflict mediation. It also carried out crisis response and survivor support.
It was easy to get everyone on board with the initiative after a few years of record-setting gun violence.
Carama thanked the police department for its efforts in addressing gun violence. He said the cross-agency collaborations, increased technological capabilities and community policing have helped the cause.
“There is a lot of communication behind the scenes,” Carama said. “That’s what keeps our outreach workers safe, but I do think it is important for the community to hear from me that I do think what public safety is doing is making a huge difference as well.”
Carama said he doesn’t consider the year a complete success. He wants to address root issues of gun violence and further reduce the impacts of violent crime.
“Obviously we’re super encouraged, but at the same (time), there’s still a lot of families, way too many families who have been impacted by gun violence,” Carama said.
“For us, it’s nothing that we celebrate, it’s just something that encourages us moving forward. Lets us know that we’re on the right track, but there’s still a lot of work left to be done.”
Can emergence from COVID factor into lower numbers?
While Lexington has taken significant steps to address gun violence, statistics from across the country indicate America’s continued emergence from the repercussions of the COVID pandemic was a major factor in reducing shootings, says Mark Bryant, a Lexington native who runs the Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks shootings across the United States.
Bryant thinks 2024 will help experts assess just how big an impact COVID had on gun violence.
“I think if 2024 continues to look like 2018 and 2019, then maybe we just flag, put a big red line on 2021 and 2022 and say these were just outliers,” Bryant said.
Through Jan. 17, there had not been a homicide reported in Lexington. At this point in 2022 there were already two homicides reported, according to police data.
David Carter, a former Kansas City police officer and currently a professor at Michigan State University who specializes in research on violent crime control, as well as other criminal justice issues, told the Herald-Leader he anticipates gun violence nationwide to continue trending down, but added it’s too early to know for sure.
Carama acknowledged that coming out of the pandemic played a factor.
“That’s why I think you’re seeing the national trend of homicides start to come down. You start to settle into our new norm coming out of the pandemic,” said Carama.
Both Carter and Bryant said that while COVID is a factor and Lexington’s reduction in gun violence is part of a national trend, groups that do work like ONE Lexington has done are helpful to the cause.
“It should go down a little bit more as long as these efforts are sustained,” said Carter who is the director of the Intelligence Program at Michigan State. “The community violence intervention, police proactive activity, the difficulty about those is sustaining those, keeping those efforts going.”
Bryant told the Herald-Leader that “any effort helps.”
“If you save one life, that’s important,” Bryant said. “If we’re looking at large statistics, one does not sound like an important thing, but it sure is for that family.
What will continue the progress?
Weathers and Carama are already laying out how to take their initiative toward curbing gun violence to another level. Weathers said he wants to focus on some strategies applied by ONE Lexington: Preventing and intervening in violence, enforcing laws and aiding the process of re-entry for those getting out of jail.
“When you talk about all those things, you don’t just talk about them on the perpetrator side, you talk about them on the victim’s side, too,” Weathers said. “Every aspect of what we’re dealing with when it comes to violent crime, you have to talk about prevention.”
Weathers said intervening between offenders and victims in a potentially dangerous situation can reduce the tragedies Lexington has seen in recent years.
He also said it’s important to have protections in place to help former offenders re-enter society without committing more crimes.
“You can’t just stop once they get out. You have to keep following, you have to keep helping, you have to keep nurturing, you have to guide people back into society,” Weathers said. “I don’t think we’ve had that before and that’s what our goal is.”
While the police department is still trying to further the cause, so is ONE Lexington.
Carama said he’s gathering information about addressing the causes of gun violence in a younger demographic, outside the 13-to-29 age range established by his organization. In an end-of-year report that assessed the agency’s work in 2023, ONE Lexington said it would like to work with children as young as 10 to include fourth and fifth graders.
Carama said sharing ONE Lexington’s responsibilities with the community is a key to sustainable progress.
“We’re making it easier. We’re removing the barriers so that these people who are already ingrained in these neighborhoods and in these communities can better do the work,” he said. “I think that’s the secret sauce for the formula.”
In interviews Thursday, Bryant and Carter told the Herald-Leader there is additional work that would drive trends further in the right direction.
Carter said greater success in arresting suspects in homicides can reduce future cases. A suspect has been arrested in half of Lexington’s homicides in 2023. The department has arrested a suspect in 66% of the homicides that occurred in 2022.
Bryant said taking more efforts to get guns off the streets would help too.
The city has recently announced an initiative to seize more stolen guns, or guns used in crimes. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Bluegrass Crime Stoppers announced a partnership last week, offering cash payouts up to $2,500 in exchange for information that leads to an arrest and seizure of a firearm used in a crime, or the arrest of someone in possession of a stolen gun.
Dozens of cases in recent years remain unsolved
While murder cases have dropped, the police department is still dealing with dozens of unsolved cases from recent years. There are 12 open cases from 2023. The police department also still has 53 open cases spanning back to 2020, according to Lexington police data, with other cases still unsolved prior to that.
Weathers has frequently asked for residents’ help in solving crimes and preventing further incidents of violence. He echoed those sentiments again in his interview with the Herald-Leader. He said sometimes physical or digital evidence isn’t enough to solve a case, and the biggest differences are often community tips.
“Public safety should be everybody’s business, and I’m not just talking about violent crime, I’m talking about how to keep people safe when they’re crossing the street,” Weathers said. “The public has got to be aware of that and they’ve got to be vocal.”
For cases that have been unsolved for years, like the death of 20-year-old Madilyn Grisham, a University of Kentucky student and Lafayette High School graduate, families are holding out hope that witnesses will finally come forward.
Grisham was shot on Payne Street, an industrial area near the Lexington Cemetery, in November 2020. No arrests have ever been made. Grisham’s grandmother, Pat Michaux, previously told the Herald-Leader her granddaughter was at a large party with other college students when she and two others were shot.
The two other victims suffered critical injuries but survived, police previously said. Grisham died at the scene.
Police believe Grisham was an innocent bystander shot accidentally.
Kristina Haulk, Grisham’s mother, is disappointed her daughter’s case has not been solved. She is still holding out hope that the investigation will lead to an arrest, but it’s becoming more difficult..
“I wish, I pray to God that somebody would come forward and say something,” Haulk said. “I don’t understand how somebody hasn’t with all the people that were there. There were supposedly so many people there and nobody wants to say anything.”
Lexington police Lt. Paul Boyles previously said witnesses deciding not to come forward and share tips has been a common issue. Even victims of non-fatal shootings are sometimes reticent to share details.
Haulk said she doesn’t blame people for not sharing information if they’re afraid of what might happen to them as a result, but she encouraged witnesses of such incidents, like the shooting that killed her daughter, to think about how they’d feel in her shoes.
“People are scared to speak up and say anything but they don’t understand that this could be your kid. It could be your kid next weekend,” Haulk said. ”As long as people keep not saying anything, (suspects are) just going to think, ‘okay we’re going to get away with it.’ And they do.”
Haulk said she still thinks about her daughter daily, especially around the holidays.
“The holidays that we just went through, of course everything gets worse. It seems to be magnified a little bit more but it’s always there,” she said. “It’s there year-round.”
There are a variety of ways people can share tips to investigators. They can call police directly at 859-258-3600 or submit tips anonymously to Bluegrass Crime Stoppers online or by calling 859-253-2020. Anonymous tips can also be submitted to P3 Tips.
Witness tips can be coupled with other evidence to confirm information and strengthen a case, Weathers said.
“What we really need is we really need people to come forward and talk to us and corroborate some of the evidence and some of the video footage that we get,” he said. “That is what’s going to make a community safer and in my mind, that’s what’s going to reduce crime overall.”
In an attempt to make submitting anonymous tips easier, Lexington police plan to create a new website that displays all the open, unsolved homicide cases with opportunities to submit anonymous information. Lexington police Sgt. Guy Miller said the website is still a work in progress.
“I think right now, people are not sure how they can do it, even with Bluegrass Crime Stoppers,” Weathers said. “Those things will still be out there, those things will still be available and they will still be anonymous if you want to report it.”
‘You have to take each case individually’
The different circumstances in each homicide case makes them more difficult to solve, Weathers said. Even in cases that share common aspects, every case has variables.
“You have to take each case individually and look at the specifics associated with it, and I think that’s what we’ve been trying to do by working collectively with ONE Lexington and several other community partners,” Weathers said.
Location and age of those involved are two aspects that were widely different across many cases in 2023. The ages of homicide victims in 2023 ranged from nine months to 80 years old. A majority of killings happened inside New Circle Road, but some others occurred near the county border line.
Lexington police have studied the variables associated with homicides so they can quickly solve future cases or prevent incidents from happening at all.
“I think that’s a big deal in keeping people from being re-victimized and using that information to keep people from being victimized at all, Weathers said.
Weathers said officials have come a long way in studying the factors that contribute to gun violence, thanks to the work of ONE Lexington and others.
“If a different variable shows up, at least we have a system in place to address that,” Weathers said.
Lexington’s 2023 homicide victims
- Marquis Tompkins Jr., 24
- Justin Cooke, 43
- Timonte Harris, 43
- Lakeisha Hill, 32
- Damar Weathers, 18
- Clinton Brown, 21
- Michael Stinnett, 16
- Jalen Henderson, 19
- Kevin Reel, 35
- Christopher Valdez, 16
- Beverly Keesecker, 68
- Stacey Marshall, 31
- Sy’Kia Epps, 9 months
- Willie Dixon, 42
- Malik Sleet, 26
- Arliss Stewart, 80
- Dametrius Hampton, 18
- Christina Fikes, 23
- Ty’Juan Pearson, 38
- Kristopher Lewis, 28
- Trevon Cummins, 23
- Esaud Cortes, 47
- Brighton Hendron, 4
- Devon Dockery Jr., 34.
This story was originally published January 19, 2024 at 6:00 AM.
