November averaged 3 gun-related incidents per day

A month of shootings

A .355-caliber bullet shredded a James Island window screen about 9 p.m. Nov. 13. It then cracked glass and zipped diagonally across a guest bedroom of a modest ranch house in Ferguson Village. Another bullet smashed into vinyl siding and careened through a living room wall as a married couple watched a football game. Their granddaughter listened to music in her bedroom. Five minutes earlier, a young family friend left the guest bedroom where he had been staying.

The man yelled for everyone to hit the floor. Three other bullets hit a blue van parked outside. The rear window shattered. The man got his pistol out of a safe. His wife called police. But the shooter was gone into the dark of the chilly fall night. 

Charleston police found six gold-colored 9mm shell casings along Riverland Drive. Three days earlier, police found three shell casings nearby after a neighbor’s complaint of shots.

These are two more cases of seemingly random gun violence in Charleston County, which experiences three gun-related incidents every single day. 

Most people feel gun violence has gotten out of control thanks to too many guns in a permissive culture that seeks to loosen gun laws instead of making it harder for people to get firearms.

“The state legislature needs to wake up and do something,” a Ferguson Village neighbor said in a recent interview. “We don’t need to go back to the Wild West where everybody can carry a gun.”

The neighbor, a woman in her 70s who asked not to be identified, said she suspected teens or young adults in their 20s as being involved in the two November shootings in her neighborhood. She urged people across the county to not be afraid to report gunfire to police.

“We need to come to the realization that two people selling drugs or carrying guns affects the whole community,” she said, adding that if the community didn’t do something about it, things could get worse.

Over the last two years, she said two area youths died from gunshot wounds near a neighborhood public library and elementary school. 

“It’s an issue when it comes that close to home. We have to realize this is our home, and we have to protect it.”

A murder in Ladson

Fast forward 10 days to a home on Garwood Drive in Ladson, about 24 miles northeast of James Island. Charleston County deputies found Jermaine Bunch Jr., 27, dead after suffering multiple gunshot wounds. Hours earlier, several bullets hit another home on the same street. No one was hurt.

On Dec. 1, deputies charged Mario Lavell Burgess, 18, of Ladson with murder and possession of a firearm in a violent crime in relation to Bunch’s death. A warrant accuses Burgess of shooting him at least 10 times before fleeing the scene. 

In November, six people in Charleston County died from gunshot wounds — three by suicide and three from homicides. Across the county, police and deputies recorded 38 shootings, 60 gun-related arrests, five armed robberies and four aggravated assaults. All totaled, there were more than 100 gun-related incidents in Charleston County in November, although the number surely is higher if data from smaller police agencies were added.

November 2022 gun deaths in Charleston County

Agency	Murder	Suicide
Charleston Police Department (CPD)	0	2
North Charleston Police Department (NCPD)	2	0
Charleston County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO)	1	0
Mount Pleasant Police Department (MPPD)	0	1

November 2022 gun violence incidents in Charleston County

	CPD	MPPD	NCPD	CCSO
Gunfire shooting	12	0	12	14
Gun arrests	24	7	15	14
Armed robbery	*	0	5	*
Aggravated assault	4	4	*	*

Gun violence may be ebbing

Senior Charleston-area police officers, however, say gun violence seems to be slowly ebbing, in part because of new models of community policing that are starting to show results.

In Charleston, for example, incidents of shootings dropped 23% from 216 in 2020 to 167 in 2022, according to data provided through a Freedom of Information request. Deaths from firearms in the city declined from 26 in 2020 to 19 in 2022, a 27% drop. Firearm-related arrests rose 77% over the two-year period.

In North Charleston, the story is similar. The murder rate dropped 11% from 2021 to 2022 (36 murders to 32) and the number of aggravated assaults with firearms went down 16% in the same time span — from 448 to 377 incidents. Arrests involving firearms fell 12%, from 424 to 372 over the last year.

Data also point to police engaging with communities more, too. In Charleston, firearms taken into evidence jumped 39%, from 502 in 2020 to 698 last year. North Charleston saw an explosion of calls for service — from 109,900 reports in 2021 to 132,842 in 2022.

Community engagement is paying off, police say

More people calling police and asking for help means North Charleston community policing initiatives are taking hold, Deputy Chief Ken Hagge said in an interview.

“Not only are we engaging in the community, but the community’s engaging in the police department,” he said. “It’s no longer an us-against-them mentality on either side, police or community.”

It wasn’t that way 30 years ago when North Charleston police were known to swoop into and saturate areas with force when a crime hot spot got really hot. Or about eight years ago when North Charleston officer Michael Slager (*) shot resident Walter Scott in the back. That event, Hagge agreed, led the department to reevaluate how they were policing and embrace a more active style of community policing and engagement.

Now, for example, residents will publicize the department is part of a community event because that will help bring out people and highlight how it’s safe. 

“That wasn’t the way it was 20 years ago,” Hagge said. “I don’t think there’s any silver bullet in crime reduction or community engagement. I think it’s a culmination of all of it. It’s a mindset. It really is. I mean, how do you police a city and not be part of that city?”

Nearby in Charleston, a series of shootings in the Eastside led Charleston police to bolster its community policing approach — even though the concept had been around for more than two decades. 

There are times, like when there’s rowdiness on King Street, when a strong police presence helps thwart violence, Deputy Chief Dustin Thompson said. But the Eastside shootings helped the department better understand the need to get to the root of problems and solve them to make neighborhoods safer.

“Just flooding a neighborhood with police officers isn’t working to reduce gun violence,” Thompson said. “What we strive to do — and it’s in our core values and it’s in our training — is that you can do a lot of things.”

For example, it can help for an officer to get out of the car and talk with people about why violence is happening.

“We stress officer presence and community engagements,” Thompson said. “That’s one of the main things we stress at the patrol level.”

Advocates say engagement works

North Charleston police recently awarded $100,000 each to 12 street-level community groups to boost engagement and make neighborhoods safer. The thinking behind the funding is that community members often can find out information to reduce violence that police might not be able to get. These “violence interrupters” can pass it along without burning community bridges and help to solve neighborhood problems.

Last week, 10 community members who know the streets took 40 hours of national training on how to interrupt violence by treating it as a public health problem. These advocates are the kind of people who can “go to somebody’s house to disrupt the violence before it escalates into something,” said North Charleston Pastor Thomas Dixon. 

“The police have their job, and the violence interrupters have their job, and we need to maintain the trust of the community so we can get in ahead of time and interrupt the violence.”

If the two groups work together to address violence as a public health issue that can fester, they’ll help solve problems, he agreed.

“I have more hope than I’ve ever had as somebody who has been an advocate of gun violence prevention and community policing for a long time,” Dixon said. “I’ve seen the first steps and know the ending is going to be lives saved and communities built.”

Skyler Baldwin contributed to this story. (*) The print version of this story incorrectly reported the name of the officer who shot Walter Scott. That has been corrected above.

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A selected November chronology of gun violence in Charleston County

Sources: Charleston County Coroner’s Office, Charleston County Sheriff’s Office, Charleston Police Department, North Charleston Police Department

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