Fresno police chief leans on old and familiar fixes to tackle homicide, shooting surge
On the second floor of Fresno Police Department headquarters hangs a blunt geographic depiction of the city’s great intractable problem.
Capt. Burke Farrah opens the door to a small suite of offices assigned to the patrol division and gestures toward five large maps of Fresno PD’s five policing districts. They take up most of the wall space in the room.
On each map, someone has affixed a blue sticker on the location of every shooting within the Fresno city limits during 2021. Red stickers mark the location of every 2020 shooting.
The difference between maps is striking. The first I get a good look at depicts the northeast division. It contains only a few colored dots, nearly all of them south of Shaw Avenue. (The division’s southern boundary stretches to Ashlan, Clinton and McKinley avenues.)
Noticeably more red and blue stickers are affixed to the central district map, which I glance at next. Then my eyes shift to the southwest district map. Colored dots practically cover the west side of Highway 99 and along Belmont Avenue.
“Pretty obvious where the problem areas are,” said Farrah, who recently transferred downtown from the central district.
Farrah and I had just attended a news conference held by his boss, Fresno Police Chief Paco Balderrama, who outlined his strategy to tackle the city’s recent surge in gun violence. To help slow the current pace of 2021 homicides (45 through Tuesday) and shootings (418), both well ahead of last year’s numbers, all of the department’s specialized units will focus on violent crime. He pledged faster response times for high-priority calls, burning through overtime if necessary, and more effective intelligence-gathering methods.
“We cannot put up with this anymore,” Balderrama said. “When we overly focus on violent crime, we will drive the numbers down. The shootings will go down, the homicides will go down, we will put a lot of people in jail. But we will suffer in other areas.”
Balderrama’s words came following a particularly violent week in California’s fifth-largest city. The toll included three homicides, most horrifically a 25-year-old mother shot in her car near Chandler Airport as her 6-year-old daughter sat in the backseat. There was a spree shooting at a downtown gas station that left bullet holes in four vehicles and a victim who police said “was lucky to be alive.” Capped off by an hours-long hostage standoff in central Fresno that overlapped with a car-to-car shooting that left a child wounded.
That’s a lot of mayhem for seven days — even here.
Reactive policing merely a short-term fix
It’s clear Balderrama felt pressure, both internal and external, to take action. So he did what police chiefs typically do in these situations: throw more resources (i.e. officer hours) at the problem.
To my ears, Balderrama’s strategies sounded much like past department policies of over-policing certain neighborhoods that have been widely criticized by reform advocates while failing to curtail violent crime. (Balderrama said there are 22,000 gang members living in Fresno that commit “a majority” of the city’s homicides and shootings. If accurate, that’s 4% of the population. Scary.)
But when one examines where most of Fresno’s gun violence occurs, as illustrated by those five maps on the wall, it’s pretty hard to argue against what Balderrama is doing. Just as long as reactive policing is merely a short-term fix and not the plan going forward.
I believe Balderrama understands this. Aaron Foster, a reformed gang member who lost two children to gun violence and now serves as coordinator for Advance Peace Fresno, does as well.
“That stuff works, but it has to be consistent,” said Foster, who lives in southwest Fresno among all the red and blue dots. “Just don’t criminalize the whole community. That’s when it becomes problematic. You have to be able to separate the tuna from the dolphins. You just can’t be pulling over whoever you feel like.”
Homicide victim refused Advance Peace
Advance Peace has 16 “fellows” (gang members who are some of Fresno’s most active shooters) committed to its 18-month program. None are involved in the current bloodshed, Foster said. Rather, the victim in the city’s 44th homicide this year, identified by police as Kylin Baca-Fullmer, was a gang member whom Foster said was feuding with a rival. Both refused to join Advance Peace.
“With this particular shooting, it was hard to get in front of,” Foster said of Saturday’s incident at Bardell and Calwa avenues. “Our words are going unheard.”
Baca-Fullmer’s killing touched off multiple retaliations, Foster said, including the shooting spree at the Arco at Fresno and C streets during which a man pumping gas at the wrong place and wrong time got grazed in the mouth by one of 36 bullets.
“Both sides have people that love them, and this is how they mourn,” Foster said.
Gun violence remains Fresno’s great intractable problem. Sure, we have a myriad of complex issues — poverty, homelessness, housing, air quality and parks quickly come to mind.
But as long as people here continue to get gunned down in the streets, both gang-members and innocent victims like the young mother, Jacqueline Flores, everything else pales in consequence.
That so much of Fresno’s gun violence takes place in one corner of the map should give none of its residents any solace.
