Police Chief Ernest Finley talks about crime prevention
On a Friday in May last year, Sheree Long was in Atlanta buying flowers to take to her mother’s Montgomery grave.
Mother’s Day was the following Sunday, and she was looking for a few trinkets for decoration when her cellphone rang.
Long picked up the phone. A voice she didn’t recognize told her Long’s oldest child, 20-year-old Montgomery resident Jeremiah McDade, had been shot.
Montgomery is one of several cities in Alabama to experience a year-over-year violent crime spike, despite a national trend of decreasing violent crime in major cities.
“It seemed like traffic was in slow motion that day,” Long told the Montgomery Advertiser in January. “It seemed like it took us hours to get to Montgomery.”
McDade, who died on May 12, was one of 44 criminal homicide victims in the city last year, Montgomery’s highest number since 2014.
In 2017, a five-officer homicide unit “cleared,” or arrested a suspect for the crime, around 70 percent of those homicides, well over the 2016 national average of 59.4 percent.
By the time she made it to Montgomery that Friday, Long's son — the boy who spent too much money at Wendy’s, the grandson who loved and respected his grandfather, the man who doted on his infant son — was already gone.
She now buys flowers for two graves when she comes back to her hometown.
‘Challenging year’
They began on the first Saturday of the new year.
Porsha Echols, a former Montgomery Public Schools teacher and beloved volunteer in the community, was suffocated inside her home on Fairfield Drive on Jan. 7, 2017. A juvenile male was arrested the next day.
The city’s youngest victim, 9-year-old Jamel Fuller, was shot to death in a Coral Lane home in late June. An 11-year-old boy, believed to be his older brother, was charged with reckless murder and second-degree assault. Fuller was the second of three juveniles killed.
Mary Gedel, 92, was the oldest to die. Police said she died of blunt-force trauma during a home invasion in late September. Twenty-seven-year-old Rodney McQueen was charged with one count of capital murder during a burglary and one count of capital murder during a robbery.
The year’s final victim, 27-year-old Jonathan Jordan, was found shot to death on Coliseum Boulevard, just days before Christmas.
More than half of Montgomery’s 2017 homicide victims were men, and the overwhelming majority were killed with guns. Of 44 deaths, only six were perpetuated by stabbing, blunt-force trauma or suffocation.
“Gun violence effects everybody, not just the person you kill,” Long said. “My sisters call me at 3 o’clock in the morning, they’re crying. I have a 16-year-old who doesn’t understand why his brother is gone. I’m constantly worried about my dad. He calls me in the morning, and nine times out of 10 I’m having a bad morning. I try not to call him when I’m upset.”
By the fall, Montgomery police had investigated more homicides in 2017 than the city had seen per year in 2014, 2015 or 2016.
Montgomery Police Chief Ernest Finley earlier this month said 2017 would go on the books as a “challenging year.
"It's a concern for the community when they see these numbers. It is a concern," Finley said. "But when we peel back those layers, there is some connectivity through relationships, through criminal activity. There's some relationship that we're seeing. It takes a little bit of time, we need forensic evidence to help us out, we need the cooperation of everybody to help us connect those dots."
Though crime rates in 30 of the country’s largest cities remain “at or near historic lows,” according to a report from the New York University School of Law, Mobile and Birmingham both recorded homicide spikes in 2017. As in Montgomery, the majority were shooting deaths.
“Violence, especially gun violence, reciprocates with other gun violence,” Mobile Public Safety Director James Barber said. “The trend can become cyclical. Violent crime begets more violent crime.
With a homicide rate of 22 per every 100,000 residents, Montgomery ranks in the middle of the state’s Big 5 pack.
Tuscaloosa and Huntsville investigated 9 and 22 criminal homicides, respectively, in 2017, the lowest of the Big 5 cities.
Both cities were also the most successful in investigating murders last year: Huntsville arrested 21 suspects, a 95 percent clearance rate, while Tuscaloosa cleared 100 percent of its homicides.
In Tuscaloosa, which has less than half the population of the next largest Big 5 city, the police department dedicates six of its 268 officers to a county-wide homicide task force of 12 investigators. The Homicide Unit investigates other violent crimes in addition to homicides in the county. According to their website, the unit investigated 800 cases in 2017.
Huntsville Police Department deploys five of its 53 investigators for homicides.
In Mobile, seven homicide detectives are designated in the department. The city cleared 75 percent of its 46 homicides, comparable to Montgomery’s numbers. But Barber cautions that clearing homicide cases isn’t a preventative measure.
“We’re doing that far too often, putting one person in the graveyard and the other person in the penitentiary. I’d rather not be thanked for catching a murderer. You’re not going to arrest your way out of it,” Barber said of Mobile’s strategies. “The immediate thing law enforcement here can do is identify inner city gang activity, and at the same time make sure that we’re assisting probation and parole in monitoring people who have been released pending trial for violent crime.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Birmingham posted the state’s highest homicide rates with 101 cases, with the lowest clearance rate at 47 percent. The city devotes eight detectives to homicide investigations.
Thirteen of Montgomery’s 44 homicides remain unsolved, including the February drive-by shooting death of 22-year-old Chavez Hamilton.
Nearly a year after the shooting, his mother Laurine Fountain said her family suffers two-fold from the loss of Hamilton, and the lack of answers in his death.
“As long as I don’t know, I have to wonder. Why did this person do this? Why did you decide to take my child? When you have to grieve…” Fountain said, trailing off to collect her thoughts. “There’s not been one day since my son died that I haven’t cried. This family is really suffering. It will be a year on the 9th, but it’s like yesterday. It just comes crashing back to me.”
In Montgomery, police say MPD’s five-officer homicide unit is solely dedicated to homicide and death investigations.
“The homicide investigator is the quarterback, responsible for running the team and the investigation. You could have 10 to 15 people working on and responding to every homicide,” Martha Earnhardt, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety, said. “Those five homicide investigators are responsible for building that case file and completing the investigation by pulling in all of the resources necessary.”
Fountain’s grandson, the oldest of Hamilton’s three children, looks and acts just like the son she lost.
It can be difficult to watch his mini-me when she sometimes still tries to pick up the phone to call her third son, who she said “brought laughter back” to her family after they lost another son years ago.
“It’s hard to be a mother who has lost two sons,” she said. “It breaks your heart to see people who are out here killing people still walking the streets. Nobody will come forward and tell anything they know about my son’s death. You see so many people say they care, but if you care you need to come forward.”
Building relationships through community policing remains a vital part of solving violent crime, police say.
“I believe firmly that each one of those that is still unsolved, there is someone out there that knows something,” MPD Chief of Operations John Bowman said. “If you know something, say something. Without the community’s help, it’s hard to solve anything. We can’t be everywhere, but citizens can. If they hear anything, we need to know.”
Moving forward
The proliferation of firearms is a growing issue in the Mobile area, Barber said, a concern echoed by Montgomery officials.
“Most of the guns we’re seeing used in crime scenes are stolen from unlocked cars,” Barber said. “People ask me all the time where the fist fights went. But you don’t punch someone with a 9-millimeter, you go to get your own 9-millimeter. That easy access to guns has really been prolific in our urban areas.”
In Montgomery, authorities will rededicated efforts in educating the public about securing their handguns, in addition to continuing ongoing education programs on conflict resolution with the city's youths. Another violent crime strategy this year will focus on prosecuting gun crimes outside of state courts.
“We’re trying to crack down and prosecute some of the gun offenses federally, which offers stiffer penalties than through the state court,” Bowman said. “That’s one of our initiatives, to take the violent guys with guns off the street longer.”
Identifying and prosecuting gun-related misdemeanors and crimes is also a 2018 policing priority. Montgomery charted 688 cases of aggravated assaults in 2017, an increase of 132 cases year-over-year, which includes misdemeanors such as menacing and the charge of firing a gun into an occupied building.
"All shooting incidents that are reported through 911, every day we will have a discussion on that to triangulate and cluster those shootings in those particular areas," Chief Finley said. "The next day, we send officers out there to do some walk-and-talks, identify shell casings, anyone who is willing to give us information on where these particular shootings took place. We've had some good success in the past week or so in doing follow up on those shootings. We've been able to make some arrests."
In two weeks, Fountain’s family will mark the one-year anniversary of Chavez Hamilton’s death. She hopes new information will soon come to light about her son’s murder, though it won’t bring closure.
“Once you lose a piece of your heart, it’s hard to get it back,” Fountain said. “I feel like I can’t love anyone like I used to, because I’m so scared that it will be taken away from me. They’ve taken a piece of me that I used to love to share.
Long continues to follow the court proceedings of the man accused of her son’s murder, who was arrested several days after the shooting. She hopes fewer mothers have to walk her path this year.
“I had three people to actually reach out to me who had recently lost someone to gun violence,” Long said. “I’m not coping, so I don’t know what to say to anybody. I can’t say that it’s going to be okay. Everybody is telling me to be strong, to keep my head up. How is that possible when you just put your kid in the ground?”