The East Precinct Advisory Council (EastPAC) gathered for its monthly meeting Thursday to discuss an ongoing wave of shootings and gang activity in the neighborhood and Seattle Police and City Hall’s response to quell the violence.

A recent period of quiet following the shooting death of a man on 25th Ave S earlier this month was busted in the hours before Thursday night’s meeting breaking a string of 17 days without a shots fired incident in the Central District or on Capitol Hill. In the AutoZone parking lot at 23rd and Jackson, two groups in cars exchanged gunfire and witnesses reported people running in opposite directions in an incident reported just before 5 PM, according to Sergeant Andrew Zwaschka, a member of SPD’s gang unit who spoke at the EastPAC meeting.

“We want to put shooters in prison,” Sgt. Zwaschka said. “It takes a lot of time. It’s hard to stand up here and ask for patience when you’re laying in your bed at night and you hear gunfire outside of your window.”

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Officers made it to the scene within a minute and is awaiting forensics results on shell casings found at the scene that can be utilized to find the guns used in the shootings. Zwaschka said that the investigation into this incident is in the “very preliminary” stages, but expected to have the findings on the shell casings by Friday afternoon.

Thursday’s meeting comes after criticism of the city’s initial response to a string of shootings including a Labor Day incident in which a bystander was shot in the leg on E Union and the Friday, September 14th incident in which a 38-year-old 25th Ave S resident was shot and killed. In response, SPD vowed to increase officers on patrol and put SWAT and K9 units on the streets of the Central District. Activist groups including Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County decried the decision to put more SWAT officers and not more outreach workers on Central Area streets.

Mayor Jenny Durkan has since pledged $7 million in spending on youth violence programs in her new budget proposal. Activists are asking the mayor to focus the money on restoring the Youth Violence Prevention Initiative with its outreach workers in South Seattle, West Seattle, and the Central District.

Thursday night at the EastPAC meeting held on the Seattle University campus, a number of city officials were in attendance, including Seattle City Council member Lorena Gonzalez, Ted Virdone, policy analyst on the staff of Kshama Sawant, , and two members of the mayor’s staff. Mayor Durkan was unable to attend due to prior commitments while SPD Chief Carmen Best was at a Seattle Urban League awards event held at the Northwest African American Museum.

SPD representatives at the meeting had a different message than the August’s EastPAC meeting in which Deputy Chief Marc Garth-Green said the department’s was putting more officers on the street.

“We’re not going to police our way out of this problem,” SPD East Precinct Commander Bryan Grenon said Thursday night. “We’re going to go after the source, we’re going to arrest these people that are committing the crimes, but for us to truly end this cycle of violence in the long term is really the wrap-around services that really empower the youth.”

The idea of encouraging the youth to find their own paths as a way to prevent violence was a theme throughout the meeting.

SPD stressed to the residents in attendance that very few people have the mental fortitude to shoot someone, so there aren’t many shooters in the area.

“There’s lots of people that are in gangs, there’s only a few that have the gumption to shoot at other people,” Zwaschka said. “We want the people who shoot guns and shoot at other people, that’s where we focus most of our resources and most of our attention, and when they get those people in jail, usually the shootings subside.”

Officers investigating report of shots fired near 22nd Av and Jackson Street. No reports of any injuries at this time. — Seattle Police Dept. (@SeattlePD) September 27, 2018

However, Zwaschka did note later that that the percentage of gang-affiliated people willing to shoot does appear to be rising.

SPD has offered no updates on a possible “person of interest” taken into custody on separate charges in Federal Way who police say is believed to be connected to the deadly shooting.

Members of the audience asked about the motivations for these shootings, but the SPD officers in attendance could not provide an answer to the question, saying only that most of these violent crimes are between different regional gangs. SPD added that the violence is not centered in Capitol Hill and the Central District, but, instead, it spreads to cities south of Seattle.

“This is a King County in total challenge,” Grenon said. “We’ve got various groups that are having a beef, I guess for the lack of a better word, and they live across city boundaries, so you’ll have incidents in Federal Way, in Kent, in Tukwila.”