Dayton Police data shows increase in homicide, gun crime victims for 2019

DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN)- New data recently released by the Dayton Police Department shows that there has been an increase homicide victims as well as gun crime victims.

“We are trying to address the issue, we’re trying to get ahead of the issue,” said Lieutenant Jason Hall.

The data shows a sharp increase in gun victim and homicide victims in August, a result of the Oregon District Mass Shooting.

Despite the shooting tragedy, Lieutenant Hall says there is no other pattern of random violence.

“The idea that there’s just a random person going down the street and being a victim of a homicide is not the case,” said Hall. “We do have situations, [like] the two young girls [who] were killed in front of the library, [and] the Oregon shooting. But, the vast majority of our homicide numbers is nowhere near random.”

Statistics show that the number of gun crime incidents decreased from 318 in 2018 to 308 in 2019.

The number of homicide victims, however, increased from 37 in 2018 to 51 in 2019.

To combat the rise in gun crime and homicides, Dayton police are turning to technology like “Shot Spottter.”

“We always try to be progressive. We are a data driven department,” said Lt. Hall. “We’re hoping to leverage a lot of those technology assets to help us more efficiently investigate [and] more efficiently deploy our resources to hopefully have a meaningful impact [and] reduce the number of these tragic events. We will continue to reach out to the community to help us address this issue. We definitely cannot do it by ourselves.”