The killing was in early spring, late one Sunday morning.
A taxi van pulled up at 15th and Market, carrying eight passengers who’d been partying the night before in a Swatara Township motel. One of them shot the driver, a 37-year-old man named Atlas Simpson, in the back of the head. Then they all fled.
On the corner, the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg was in the middle of services. The ushers at the back noticed the police cars first. Word rippled through the congregation. Eventually it reached the Rev. Howard Dana, who stood up between songs to make the announcement: there’s been a shooting, police are investigating, we’re safe but we have to stay in the building. “It was pretty traumatic to think somebody had been killed literally right through the wall from where we were,” Dana recalled recently. Parishioners who had parked on the street found their cars were now part of a crime scene.
That was in March 2012. In September, around 4 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon, police responded to another shooting in the neighborhood. This time, the victim was an 18-year-old named Valdez Cockren. He died of a gunshot wound to the chest, in a grassy lot behind the church’s back alley.
In the six years between 2009 and 2014, there were 87 homicides in Harrisburg. More often than not, the victims resembled Cockren and Simpson in two respects: they were black males, and they died at the barrel of a gun. They were also young. Out of the 61 African-American men killed in those years, 49 were between the ages of 17 and 35, with a median age of 25. (These and other numbers in this story, unless otherwise attributed, were compiled by TheBurg with data from the county coroner, court records and newspaper reports.)
And more often than not, when there was a murder in Harrisburg, someone was arrested and put away for the crime. Out of the 87 homicides in the period surveyed, police made arrests in all but 20 of the cases—about 77 percent. Even when you isolate homicides of African-American men, the proportion of cases solved remains almost the same, at around 74 percent.
The same can’t be said for every city. Jill Leovy, in her recent book “Ghettoside,” discusses the disproportionate representation of African-American men among homicide victims nationwide. As she writes, they are “just 6 percent of the country’s population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered.” But she also cites a disturbing figure about Los Angeles homicides in particular. In a 13-year period, in cases where a black male was murdered, arrests were made only 38 percent of the time. The high murder rate, she argues, is partly a result of the low arrest rate, which leads to a sense of impunity for the murders of young black men. “The system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap,” she writes.
Since protests erupted last year in Ferguson, Mo., over the police killing of an unarmed 18-year-old black man, the national conversation on race and policing has been focused on overzealous enforcement and systemic oppression. Harrisburg’s homicide statistics, though, raise a different set of questions. Why are most murder victims young black men? Should law enforcement do more to protect the most vulnerable communities? And does the city’s rate of homicides have anything to do with whether or how they’re solved?
…
Leovy’s argument invokes what criminologists refer to as “deterrence theory.” If you take the view that a crime is a rational choice, made by a discerning person, it follows that various factors will make committing a crime more or less appealing. One deterring factor, according to Jonathan Lee, a criminologist at Penn State Harrisburg, is “fear of punishment”—a criminal’s sense that his illegal act will be answered with retribution. How strongly a criminal fears punishment depends on how severe the punishment is, how swiftly it’s handed down, and how certain it is to occur, although, Lee said, “severity and swiftness matter less than certainty.”
A police department’s homicide clearance rate theoretically has an effect on deterrence—the higher the clearance rate, the greater the certainty of punishment. But it’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions. For one, despite their share of headlines, homicides are rare. A homicide also often represents the end of an escalating series of events between the murderer and the victim. Understanding it, Lee said, requires understanding “how the prelude to it unfolded, even to the last minute.” It might be possible to reduce property crimes with some well-placed interventions, like more monitoring by police, repairing streetlights and starting neighborhood watch groups. But a domestic dispute that ends in a murder involves a more complex succession of factors, and it can be difficult to determine what kind of intervention might have changed the outcome.
Another way to try to make sense of Harrisburg’s homicide statistics is to focus not on the perpetrator but on the victim. Criminologists call this approach “routine activity theory,” which explains people’s likelihood to become victims of crime by way of the situations they’re routinely exposed to. The theory might help explain some of the racial disparities in local statistics. Between 2009 and 2014, for instance, there were 127 homicides in Dauphin County. According to census data, three-fourths of the county’s 270,000 residents are white. Yet half of the homicide victims in the period surveyed were black men killed on the streets of Harrisburg.
The discrepancy, however, can seem less startling when you consider the prevailing circumstances in the neighborhoods where most of those homicides occurred. Factors like poverty, large numbers of blighted and abandoned houses, high unemployment and even a high proportion of rental properties are all correlated with increased rates of interpersonal crime. Such factors diminish neighbors’ “collective willingness to intervene when there is a commotion or disturbance,” Lee said. If the county’s African-American population is more concentrated in areas with these characteristics, then perhaps the greater exposure to violent crime is not so surprising. “It’s not merely a race concentration, but more about a larger profile of the neighborhood,” said Lee.
At any rate, none of this explains what, if anything, law enforcement can do about it. “Homicide is such a rare event, and is more emotional than economic and rational,” Lee said. “So changes in policing might not make any difference.”
…
Harrisburg Police Chief Thomas Carter investigated his first homicide, the slaying of a 27-year-old man in Hall Manor, in 1994. A year prior, two police officers had been shot at a Lower Paxton Township apartment while investigating a missing persons case. Carter, who was then on uniformed patrol, was called up to help in the Criminal Investigations Division, or CID.
Training Carter was Det. Richard Stilo, a long-time veteran of the force who was known for his skill at talking to criminals. “We got the call, and we drove separate cars,” Carter recalled. “And I couldn’t figure out why.” When they arrived at the scene, Carter turned to Stilo and asked, “What do we do now?” “And he looked at me, he said, ‘You wanted to be up here, a detective? You go figure it out,’” Carter said. “So I was like, ‘Huh?’ He walked to his car.”
Carter prides himself on his ability to build relationships in the communities he polices, a trait that may have something to do with the reasons he became an officer. Growing up, he lived next door to a detective who would often stop and talk with him. Another officer, Tom Kohr, would engage Carter and his friends while on patrol in the neighborhood. “We would be out there playing sports, and he would, you know, stop and give us the time of day,” Carter said. “And to me, I thought that was the neatest thing—‘Wow, a police officer is taking time out to talk to us.’ And I became curious. Under what rules do these guys work? What’s governing them?”
He drew on these experiences as an officer. One of his early assignments was on a curfew detail, from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. “It was very interesting chasing juveniles, and actually, like, getting to know them, building a relationship with them,” he said. “A lot of them weren’t doing anything bad. It was in the summertime. A lot of them were just curious. They just wanted to be outside.”
He also found that his roots in the community helped him solve cases. He is African-American, and a graduate of Harrisburg High. “A lot of people, they knew me,” he said. “I had made a lot of friends.” He routinely gave out his cell number, because people who didn’t want to be seen talking to an officer often would be willing to give information over the phone. Treating people with respect and forthrightness, he discovered, could lead to surprising results, even from criminals. “I had people wanted for violent felony crimes come to my house and surrender to me because they trust me,” he said. “They knew I wasn’t gonna lie to them, I was gonna treat ‘em right. And the respect was there.”
Carter oversaw the CID’s special operations unit from 2009 until 2013, when he was named police chief. In 2009, there were 16 homicides in the city, which, the Patriot-News reported, made it Harrisburg’s deadliest year in almost two decades. All but four were cleared before the year was out, most within a matter of days. (Of the remaining four cases, one was cleared a year later, while the suspect in another was acquitted in 2013. Two cases remain unsolved.) Carter attributed the clearance rate to his detectives, who he said are distinguished by “sincerity and caring.” “I know detectives that have given up vacation time to solve homicides,” he said. He also credited his forensics team, which he described as “second-to-none,” in part because they deal with more homicides than other nearby municipalities.
Still, he acknowledged that one of the most difficult tasks was getting people to cooperate with an investigation. “People in this city do not appreciate the gun violence here, or any kind of violence,” he said. “But they’re put in a situation that they don’t want to jeopardize their lives or the lives of their loved ones. So a lot of them tend to just swallow hard, and don’t say anything.”
At the same time, there are forces working in the detectives’ favor. One, Carter said, is time—a formerly reticent witness or informant might get picked up later on a different charge, and suddenly be more willing to talk. There’s also the influence of people in the community who’ve simply had enough. “There’s times where, people who go to court to testify, some of them are forced to,” he said. “But a lot of them that I dealt with, they wanted to. Because they’re tired of the nonsense.”
…
In the wake of the 2012 homicides, parishioners at the Unitarian Church and other churches took action. For several years, church members had been involved with Heeding God’s Call, a faith-based movement to end gun violence. After Simpson’s and Cockren’s deaths, the group held vigils to mourn the victims and pray for peace.
Heeding God’s Call formed in 2009, building on the momentum from a gathering of historically pacifist Christian churches in Philadelphia. A theme of the conference, said Belita Mitchell, a pastor at First Church of the Brethren in Harrisburg, was “solidarity in the face of the growing loss of life and violence.” Church members demonstrated outside Colosimo’s, a gun shop near Philadelphia’s Center City, over rumors the shop was facilitating straw purchases. Months later, the federal government revoked Colosimo’s license, following an investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Following the conference, some of the pastors in attendance brought the work to Harrisburg. Mitchell, who is now the chair of the group’s Harrisburg chapter, said that they had a two-pronged mission: to work with gun shops to curb straw purchases, and to bear “public witness” in the wake of a gun death. With the first prong, Mitchell said, the goal was to “treat all gun sellers as good guys—to say ‘Work with us to close the loopholes.’” The initiative went nowhere. “It was a nightmare,” Mitchell said. “Nobody wanted to talk to us.”
The vigils, however, became the group’s mainstay. “Those were incredible,” Howard Dana, the Unitarian Church’s former pastor, recalled. They gave “black ministers and black lay leaders a place to speak” to their community, and offered a different angle to the press, which was “focused way too much on the sensational.” “We wanted to focus on the grief, the sense of loss, the sense of injustice,” he said.
Ron Tilley, an organizer with Heeding God’s Call, and also a reverend at First Church of the Brethren, said the vigils were also about creating a “cooling off time” following a homicide. “As people of faith, we can interact with people who might be contemplating retribution,” he said. This was especially important, he said, for young people, whom the group offers to train in principles of non-violence through a leadership program. He referred to a time when, “anecdotally,” there’d been a spate of “retaliatory shootings.” “Anecdotally, there has been a decrease in those kinds of shootings,” he said. “I think the vigils have been a part of that.”
…
The murder of Valdez Cockren has not been solved. But a week after Atlas Simpson’s death, a 20-year-old named Adrian Collins turned himself in. A year later he went to trial. Chief Carter, at the time a sergeant detective, testified, because he had recognized Simpson at the scene. They were neighbors in Steelton, where Carter had often seen Simpson with his dog—a pit bull that was in the cab’s front passenger seat the day he was murdered.
The trial record is a good study in how hard it can be to get an authoritative account of a murder. The state built its case in part on a surveillance video that prosecutors said showed Collins at a convenience store robbery the day before the murder, using a gun like the one that killed Simpson. They also brought witnesses who had been in the taxi, none of whom would say definitively they saw Collins pull the trigger. One witness said she was only cooperating because police told her she might be charged. Another identified Collins as the shooter in a statement to police, but said on the stand he’d been scared at the time and had since tried to “redo” his statement. Witnesses did testify, however, that they saw Collins grab cash from the cab and that they’d seen him carrying what looked like a gun. He was given a life sentence, which was upheld a year later on appeal.
Why does Harrisburg have a relatively high solve rate? Perhaps it has something to do with the compact nature of the city. Perhaps it has to do with good relationships between community members and the police. Perhaps it reflects skilled detective work. Whatever the causes, it’s difficult to conclude that it has much effect on deterrence, when both the murder rate and the solve rate in Harrisburg are high. Homicide, as Lee said, is at the far end of a spectrum of violence—the best opportunity to intervene may be at an earlier stage. “Again, murder is just an extreme version of interpersonal or even property crime that went wrong,” he said. “Most likely, there must have been a prelude to it. How the community reacts to the prelude makes a huge difference.”
