In the wake of several recent shootings involving teens in Kent, community members decided its time to take action.
Youth advocates hosted a forum on April 26 to discuss reaching at-risk youth and creating a gang prevention task force.
“We felt like if we can have everybody put their own hats down just for a moment, and we can come together and create something that when the city or anybody says ’Is there somebody I can take my youth to?’ We can say we have a task force and in this task force we have all these resources,” said Tye Whitfield, who helped organize the forum.
The community needs to do a better job reaching youth, said Whitfield, who is running for Kent City Council.
“Once we found out about the killing, of course, we are devastated, but then to find out these are youth that are coming to our after school programs, we are like this is at our back door,” she said. “This is someone who is coming to the center and we are investing in and we have lost.”
During the forum, Assistant Police Chief Rafael Padilla gave an update on the recent shootings that have affected youth in Kent.
On April 18, 17-year-old Roberto Matamoros-Izaguirre was killed at a service station at West Meeker Street and 64th Avenue South. The shooters also injured a 16-year-old boy had been involved in another shooting the previous week. He was not injured in the first shooting but his friend was.
No arrests have been made in either incident, and police believe the shootings are gang related.
Padilla said there has been an increase in gang violence gang violence in South King County this year.
“We know we’ve got some ongoing issues,” he said. “There’s a couple gang wars going on. … We’ve got Latinos versus Latinos, blacks versus blacks, Latinos versus blacks. We’ve got a little bit of everything going on.”
In the first four months of 2017, there were 14 gun-related homicides in South King County, including three in Kent. In that same time, there were 40 shootings with injuries, including six in Kent, and 87 reports of shootings with property damage.
“In addition to that, as if that wasn’t enough, 130 incidents have called into 911 in which there were reports of gunshots being heard and we weren’t able to locate any damage and nobody was hit,” Padilla said.
The number of shootings is the highest the city has seen in past decade, Padilla said.
“We are talking about numbers that haven’t been this high since about 2008, and previous to that haven’t been this high since the ’80s,” he said. “This is a real serious fight. There are concerns and this is not what we’ve been used to, particularly in Kent, for a while.”
The community needs to step in to get to the root of the problem, said Lawrence Boles III, who pastors Redeemed by the Blood Pentecostal Church in Kent.
“Until we really get in the faces of these youth, we’re never going really understand what their real needs are what their challenges are,” said Boles, who was involved in crime, gangs and drugs as a teen and now ministers to youth. “We are just going to keep seeing murder on the TV, and we’re just going to keep coming together, which I believe we should be coming together even in spite of what is happening right now. If we all just showed community support even before all of these shootings – nobody was meeting before there was shooting. Now that there is so much activity going on in the city of Kent, we have a room full of people which we should have started a long time ago. Until we get this to where we stick together, where we come together. … We’ve got to come together before things happen and really come together with a plan so we can capitalize and stop – we might not be able to stop it, but we can affect change.”
The gang prevention task force’s goal will be to do just that.
“The kids are looking for people that are going to be in the schools, that are going to come to where they’re at,” Whitfield said. “Please don’t sign (up) if you think we are going to be in the office. Please don’t sign (up) if you’re scared to talk to kids. … We need the ones that are saying ‘I will go out to the kids. I will go out the community center and play b-ball with the kids, will go outside and talk to the kids. We need the hands-on ones for this particular task force.”
A second meeting is being planned to get the task force started. Anyone who is interested in joining the task force can contact Whitfield at 253-561-5205.
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