The number of shootings are increasing, so police are cracking down on gangs

Police will make traffic stops and search suspected gang members to stop the rising number of shootings in Fresno, police Chief Jerry Dyer said Monday.

“In the first week of January, we’ve had 14 shootings in the city of Fresno with 10 people struck by gunfire,” including a 17-year-old boy who was shot and killed on the street Sunday, he said.

Many of the shootings involve feuding gangs, Dyer said.

“We know those shootings have created an incredible amount of fear throughout our city,” Dyer said.

At 7:24 p.m Sunday at California and Elm, a teen boy was walking with a girl away from a bus stop, he said.

“There was a car that pulled up occupied by several Hispanic males,” Dyer said. “At least one of those males had a bandana on his face. And a question was asked of the victim, ‘What do you bang?’ The reply was, ‘I don’t. I’m not part of a gang.’ Immediately, one of the individuals in the vehicle opened fire and shot this victim multiple times.”

He was pronounced dead at CRMC. He was identified as Adalberto Ocampo, a student at Cambridge High.

Police don’t have any clues to release yet but are investigating leads, Dyer said.

There are too many shootings in the city, the police chief told reporters at a news conference. “This violence did not just occur this past week,” Dyer said.

Last year, “we had 516 shootings in our city,” he said. Of those, 406 occurred in the southwest, southeast and central policing districts, he said.

To do something about it, a few weeks ago police presence was beefed up in the city by pulling officers off other assignments, he said. Officers will find legal reasons to stop people believed to be involved in gangs to look for and take away guns, he said.

“It is incumbent upon us as an agency to remove as many of those gang members from our streets as possible, and to take as many firearms off of the streets as we can,” Dyer said.

Guns owned by gang members have typically been stolen from homes or businesses, he said.

Despite increasing police presence on the street, a crackdown on drunken driving, including the controversial “bar watch” program in which those leaving bars and showing signs of intoxication are stopped, will continue, he said.

The police force is understaffed by about 1,000 officers, Dyer said in response to a question.

Five shootings on Sunday in Fresno do not appear to be related to each other or to the five shootings that happened on New Year’s Day, police believe.

Police are pursing gangs – there are 100 in Fresno involving about 20,000 people, he said – because the evidence is that several guns were involved, he said.

“There were also different gangs that were involved in terms of victims, which leads us to believe there are several ongoing feuds occurring in our city,” he said.

And many victims were uncooperative or evasive, he said.

On New Year’s Day there were five shootings between 10:20 a.m. and 3:15 p.m. in which three people were shot, he said. “All five of those shootings involve what we believe to be the same suspects,” he said.

One victim was a homeless man shot in the leg in the area of Trinity and O’Neill, police said. A homeless man was shot at but not hit in the 1800 block of East California Avenue, while another homeless man was shot at but not hit near Los Angeles and E Street.

And at 1091 E. Santa Clara Ave. a man working on a car in front of his home was not hit but his car was struck by a bullet, Dyer said.

In another incident, two people were standing in front of an apartment in the 3300 block of East Normal Avenue and both were hit by gunfire, Dyer said.

Police have identified what Dyer called two “persons of interest in this case” but aren’t releasing any names yet, he said. Shell casings were recovered in four of the five shootings and all came from the same handgun, he said.

The neighborhoods were targeted although it does not appear the victims were especially targeted because it does not appear they had any type of conflict with the suspects who police are looking for, he said.

“What we believe is that these victims are believed to be targets of opportunity,” he said.

Dyer said a double shooting that happened Jan. 5 in northeast Fresno appears to be a marijuana robbery.

About 8:45 p.m., shots were fired at 970 E. Spruce Avenue and someone activated a panic alarm, he said. A man, 26, and a woman, 32, were found shot several times. Both are expected to survive, but the woman is still in critical condition, he said.

Police found a broken Styrofoam ice chest that appeared to have held a lot of marijuana, he said. The pot was gone when police arrived.

Sunday, there were five shootings with five people struck including the 17-year-old boy who was killed, he said.

The first happened just after midnight at 4164 E. Olive Ave. outside of a party. A man was struck in a drive-by shooting. The victim showed up at Community Regional Medical Center and had been shot in the hip.

About 2 a.m., two people went to the CRMC with gunshot wounds to their legs who had been hit in drive-by shooting. Both are gang members; the incident happened at 5256 E. Wildflower Ave., he said.

The third shooting happened about 10 a.m. Sunday at a bus stop near Peach and Olive avenues. A 33-year-old man was sitting on the bus stop and “for no apparent reason was fired upon by individuals in a vehicle.” The suspects were Hispanic or white, he said. The victim, who has special needs, was shot in the leg, he said. The victim has been cooperative, he said.

At 4:56 p.m. at 1337 E. McKenzie Ave., a shooting picked up by the ShotSpotter system. Police found a man who had been shot at, but not struck.

In Fresno County, a drive-by shooting in southeast Fresno happened about 6 p.m. Sunday when a man was sitting on a chair in his front yard on Clay Avenue near Peach Avenue, and another was walking down Clay when a vehicle drove by and someone inside fired shots.

The men were two to three houses apart from each other when they were shot, leading sheriff’s deputies to believe that they were targeted individually. They did not know each other, the sheriff’s department said.

Both men, in their early 20s, were taken to Community Regional Medical Center. One was reported in stable condition and the other was in critical condition.

This story was originally published January 8, 2018 at 5:01 PM with the headline "The number of shootings are increasing, so police are cracking down on gangs."