Stamford Police Lieutenant on Spike in Violent Crime

In the Month of July we have seen a substantial increase in violent activity with the City of Stamford. In this Month alone we have seen 3 occupied houses come under gunfire and in two of the incidents the gunfire came within inches of hitting a sleeping person. We also had another occupied house come under fire in the last week in June. In all these incidents no one was struck however it shows the prevalence of the access to handguns and the careless disregard to human life that we are dealing with. In all these incidents we believe that they are all separate incidents committed by different persons. This seems to be a new trend with occupied dwellings coming under direct attack. These cases are harder to prove due to the fact that the shootings come under the cover of darkness and that there are less witness's at this time of the night.

In this Month, we have had seven people shot within the City and two persons have succumb to their injuries due to the gunfire. We are actively investigating the two homicides from July from the evidence collected. We have also noticed the lack of community cooperation in these shooting investigations. In all the shootings the survivors have failed to cooperate with the Police investigation and all said that they will retaliate on their own. This is disturbing due to the fact that the shootings will continue until they are successful on their retaliation attempts. The SPD have reached out to so many community members and we have received little or no cooperation. We have not even received anonymous calls, like we have in the past, from people who don't want to get involved but want to assist us.

To combat this lack of cooperation from the victims and community we have stepped up patrols in areas that have been plagued with the violence. Our Patrol units, Neighborhood Impact Unit, and Narcotics/Organized Crime squad has taken a more proactive role with dealing with this gun violence and has seized 6 handguns and made numerous arrests associated with the seizures of guns. The DB and ID units are examining all the guns and shell casings that are seized in these shootings and comparing them to all these incidents. We hope even though we are lacking the community support we will be able to make arrests based on the forensic value of the evidence seized. Even with the number of guns seized this month we continue to get shots fired calls almost every night and we continue to aggressive investigate all of these violent incidents.

Lt. Diedrich Hohn