What’s driving Sacramento’s violence in 2024 after a weekend surge of homicides?

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Gun violence that took five lives in Sacramento in just 26 hours last weekend underscored several deadly trends — including gang posturing on social media, dangerous “sideshows” and the saturation of guns among youth — that together have pushed up the homicide rate in the city by more than 20%, authorities and violence prevention experts said.

The unrelated incidents began in midtown early Saturday, when Colby Tevis, 22, was shot while celebrating his sister’s 26th birthday, and culminated in Sunday’s fatal shooting of Kevin Waterman, 26, and Joshua Brown, 20, at so-called sideshows, illegal street gatherings in which participants perform stunts with their cars as onlookers watch.

While the victims and perpetrators of the separate incidents may not have been directly connected, most appear to be linked to a youth culture where taunts and rivalries are amplified on social media, and guns are ubiquitous, said Berry Accius, a violence prevention advocate who works with teens and young adults.

“Younger and younger individuals are getting caught up in the gun culture,” Accius said. “It’s not just happening in our disenfranchised areas. It’s spreading out to downtown, suburban areas. There are more suburban kids that are not affiliated with gang culture that have guns.”

City sees outlier in crime statistics

Despite a drop in crime in most categories across the city, homicides in Sacramento have increased compared to this time last year, data show. During the first eight months of 2024, there were 29 homicides in the city, a 21% increase over the same period in 2023, Mayor Darrell Steinberg said. The five deaths over the weekend made the increase for the year thus far even larger, he said.

“Overall crime is down and yet we come back to the same thing — t oo many guns,” Steinberg said. “Our police department does its very best to try to confiscate as many of these weapons as possible, but they are everywhere.”

Data released this month by the FBI shows that there were 1.26 million violent crimes across the United States in 2023, down slightly from the 1.31 million in 2022 but up dramatically from 987,000 in 2021. Homicides stood at about 20,700 in 2023, down nearly 12% from 23,400 in 2022 but still considerably higher than the 14,600 homicides reported in 2014.

The federal government’s National Crime Victimization Survey showed a doubling of non-murder crimes committed with a weapon from 2021 to 2022, with a modest drop in 2023.

Understanding the trends underlying gun violence, including the reasons that homicides in Sacramento are up while other crimes are decreasing, is key to addressing an issue that is devastating families and bringing fear to neighborhoods. The city council was set to begin discussions at its Tuesday meeting on how to allocate funds from a cannabis business tax for youth services, including violence prevention.

Dr. Garen Wintemute, who directs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the UC Davis Medical Center, said that crime does ebb and flow, and that there was no evidence thus far that the cluster of homicides over the weekend were directly related. However, he said, they could be linked by underlying trends.

“This isn’t a spree. This isn’t some person going around town over a few days killing people,” Wintemute said. “But it might be that we have a number of underlying conditions that foster violence and the effects of that were more evident at this time than others.”

Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho said that while he could not directly address the investigations into the latest shootings, there are several trends underlying the gun violence cases he is seeing in his office.

More ‘crimes committed by younger and younger people’

One such trend is the youth of offenders, Ho said. Federal data shows that nearly a third of murders in the United States over the past five years were committed by people in their twenties. That is showing up in the cases prosecuted locally as well, he said.

Sacramento County prosecutors handled 357 juvenile cases that involved firearms in 2023, up from 222 in 2020, according to data provided by Ho’s office. The D.A.’s Office prosecuted 25 juveniles in shooting cases in 2023, up from 16 in 2020. There were 26 juvenile homicide defendants in 2023, the same as in 2020. Illegal gun possession among juveniles accounted for 84 cases in 2020, rising to 126 by 2023.

“We are seeing right now a lot of juveniles committing violent crimes,” Ho said. “We’re seeing a lot of crimes committed by younger and younger people.”

Driving that increase, in part, are reforms to some juvenile justice laws and policies that make it harder to try underage offenders as adults, Ho said.

Another factor is the use of social media by young people to flaunt their differences and fights with rivals, he said.

“They’re getting on social media,” Ho said. “They’re taunting their rivals, they’re flashing guns, they’re talking about gangs and then what’s happening is there are violence and shootings and crimes that spiral and escalate out from those instances of social media.”

To combat these trends, Ho said his office was working with law enforcement to identify and prosecute those involved last weekend’s shootings, and also working with community organizations to address some of the underlying issues. Ho said he also planned to press the Legislature to address what he said were unintended consequences of recent laws that decreased and regulated penalties for many offenses.

Local, state officials targeting sideshows

Illegal sideshows are another draw for violence, said Officer Allison Smith, a spokeswoman for the Sacramento Police Department. The department is focusing some of its investigation and prevention work after the two homicides at sideshows over the weekend on ways to curtail the increasingly dangerous events.

On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed four bills aimed at curtailing sideshows , including a measure that makes it easier for police to confiscate vehicles that are used in them.

“We have seen too many people killed or hurt at these events,” Newsom said.

Earlier this month, a woman was injured when a vehicle at a sideshow plowed into a group of people, and another sideshow took over part of the Bay Bridge .

Steinberg said he supported the new laws’ harsher penalties for participants in the events, which can draw hundreds of people and lead to crashes, feuds and attacks.

Sacramento City Councilwoman Lisa Kaplan, who represents North Natomas, said she plans to revive a proposed local ordinance that would increase fines for sideshow-related offenses. It would allow vehicles to be taken by police and clarify that people cannot block or obstruct a sidewalk or street to hold a sideshow, she said.

Kaplan, whose district includes an area in the Pell/Main Industrial Park where one of the weekend’s sideshow shootings took place, said the event had attracted 1,000 people. She said her district had connections to at least two of the people killed over the weekend: Waterman was killed in the industrial park sideshow and Tevis, the J Street victim, went to Inderkum High School. Brown was gunned down a few miles away in South Natomas.

To address the weekend’s violence, she said, the city needs to understand why the cluster of shootings appeared and find ways to address gaps in services and enforcement that may be developing.

And she said that the trends underlying the weekend’s violence are doing more than knitting five separate homicides together. They’ve also inextricably linked two families. High school football coach Greg Najee Grimes , who was shot dead while waiting to cross the street near a Sacramento nightclub in 2022, had taught Tevis at Inderkum High School.

“From a mom perspective it breaks my heart,” said Kaplan, who attended a vigil in honor of Tevis on Monday night . “He was out celebrating his sister’s birthday and he didn’t come home from that. How do you heal from that?”