MANCHESTER, N.H. – The Manchester Board of Mayor and Aldermen received a presentation from Manchester Police Department leaders on Tuesday night highlighting recent updates around the department’s gun violence prevention strategy.
Created in June 2022, the data-driven approach created by Manchester police focuses on four core tenets: direct interaction with the city’s youth, targeting “hot spot areas”, building community cooperation to address the issue, and focusing on the key perpetrators of gun crime in the city.
In the focus on youth, 51 at-risk youth are participating in efforts such as the Manchester Police Athletic League aimed preventing their involvement in gun crimes with 402 children served by the Adverse Childhood Experience Response Team (ACERT) over the past 13 months.
Manchester Police Department Lieutenant Matthew Barter told the board that there was a 17 percent reduction in gun crime within the hot spot areas such as the corner of Lowell and Elm, with minority arrests almost 50 percent less within a random sample of hot spot areas compared to a other random sample area in the city.
Barter added that over 2022, there were 604 foot patrols, 2,841 community contacts with officers and 228 requests on the city’s see/click/fix app in those hot spot areas.
Within the presentation, additional efforts to make connections with the community came through coordination with the PHAST Team, microgrants to support community events and community surveys given to certain residents that requested police service.
In the final focus of the plan, Manchester Police Department Chief Allen Aldenberg noted that 112 guns were taken out of the hands of individuals legally disallowed from possessing guns and the city posted a 56 percent clearance rate of non-fatal shooting incidents. Those efforts came from collaboration with a variety of state and federal criminal justice organizations as well as the usage of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding to obtain additional overtime pay for officers and detectives to place additional focus on gun crimes.
Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig noted that just four percent of individuals identified by police were represented in 63 percent of the city’s shooting incidents.
While there was a 41 percent increase in gun-crime related events and 21 percent increase in gunfire incidents in 2022, there was a 47 percent decrease in non-fatal shootings and a 23 percent increase in arrests for gun crimes.
That last point was emphasized by Aldenberg, who noted that with many of the shootings reported to the public, a suspect connected to the crime is arrested within 48 to 72 hours.
Aldenberg said that there is still work to do in several areas, most notably increasing cooperation between the general public and investigators.
“We need to get the public to know that they can trust us if they come forward with confidential information,” he said. “If anyone has information about gun violence happening in their neighborhood, the time to come forward is now.”
He also stressed the need for individuals who own guns within their cars to lock their car doors and leave the gun within a secured container.
“People leaving guns in their car and their cars unlocked, I can think of no greater negligence,” he said.
Aldenberg noted that some criminals are giving guns to children and teenagers to hold temporarily out of a suspicion that police are less likely to interrogate children.
In response to a question from Ward 3 Alderman Pat Long, he said that police aim to “saturate” downtown bars and nightclubs at closing time in the hopes of preventing significant violence among intoxicated individuals heading home. However, there are still reports of violence related to those establishments, such as the recent incidents at the 603 Bar and Grill and the GOAT among others.
