Spokane law enforcement leaders propose new strategies, state policy changes to drive down homicides

Victor Garcia fondly remembers riding electric scooters with his uncle and talking with him about his future.

Javier Chavez was a caring man with a troubled past, but he encouraged his 17-year-old nephew to be a good kid, Garcia said.

“He was like another father figure,” Garcia said. “And so when he died, it was like a dad died.”

Chavez, 45, was fatally stabbed in November in downtown Spokane. Anthony L. Chastain, 50, was arrested on suspicion of murder in the killing.

Chavez was among the 25 homicides last year in Spokane County, matching the 2023 homicides total. The killings don’t include car crashes, police shootings or delayed shooting deaths.

Garcia, a junior at Gonzaga Preparatory School, said he was extremely close with his uncle, but he hadn’t seen him since Garcia’s birthday in February 2024.

“That’s what hurt me the most,” Garcia said.

His death taught Garcia to always check in with loved ones, because tomorrow is never guaranteed for anyone.

A witness with Chavez the morning of Nov. 10 at the Old Hope House, 111 W. Third Ave., told police Chavez and Chastain started fighting over a woman they had both dated when Chastain stabbed Chavez once. The Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Office said Chavez died from a stab wound to the chest.

Garcia called Chavez “Tío” or “Tío Javi,” meaning “Uncle” or “Uncle Javi,” and said he was one of the nicest people he ever met.

Garcia, who boxes, said his uncle never saw him box competitively because Chavez was previously incarcerated. Garcia saved a seat in the audience to honor his uncle at one of his boxing matches following the killing.

Chavez was trying to change for the better, but “he died before he could change,” he said.

Chavez liked to play handball and loved cars. He liked to crack jokes, but was serious when needed, like talking about Garcia’s grades in school and his bright future, his nephew said.

“His death really impacted me, because the conversations we would have were awesome,” Garcia said.

He said he was angry at Chastain at first, but there’s nothing he can do about it.

Chavez had one child, but he died in August from a drug overdose, Garcia said.

“I will always remember what he did to my uncle, what he took from everyone, what he took from my uncle’s mom,” he said of Chastain. “She lost a grandson and then two months later, her son.”

The number of homicides in Spokane County has largely stayed the same in recent years.

Before the previous two years of 25 homicides, there were 29 in 2022 and 24 in 2021, according to previous Spokesman-Review reporting.

Of the 25 homicides in 2024, 18 were in Spokane and seven were outside the city.

Spokane police recorded an infant death in November in the Cliff-Cannon Neighborhood as one of the 19 homicides, but the Spokesman-Review chose not to include it as a homicide because the medical examiner’s office has not determined the cause and manner of death and police have not charged anyone.

Of the 19 homicides reported by Spokane police, 10 involved firearms. A firearm was used in at least five, possibly six, of the county homicides, as the body of one of the victims was not recovered.

How the city views the problem

Violence is top of mind for the county’s top cops.

Spokane Police Department Chief Kevin Hall, who was sworn in last summer after more than 30 years with the Tucson Police Department, said reducing gun violence is his top priority, and he plans to implement various strategies to accomplish this goal.

“Spokane has an issue with gun violence,” Hall said at a January news conference. “We have to address it, and we need to address it with the community.”

Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels said the seven homicides last year in the county were on par with previous years, but he’s worried about an increase in aggravated assaults and believes state policy changes that hold violent offenders accountable will lower violent crime rates.

Hall told reporters at the January news conference there were almost 100 shootings last year in Spokane. Of those, 45 people were shot.

Firearm homicide rates are highest among teens and young adults, as well as Black, Hispanic, American Indian and Alaska Native people, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hall said shooters in Spokane and across the country are becoming younger. He couldn’t directly explain the trend, but he told The Spokesman-Review the COVID-19 pandemic affected people and crime.

“I think there’s got to be some kind of correlation between COVID, the education system trying to ramp back up from that, and our kids who are just seemingly more violent right now,” Hall said.

Hall used the January shooting death of 13-year-old Gavin Looper as a rallying point to address gun violence at the news conference, telling reporters the teen was innocently playing video games inside a northeast Spokane home when 25-year-old Glen D. Burkey fired rounds into the house, striking Looper in the head, Hall said. Burkey was charged with suspicion of murder.

“Gun violence is killing our children,” Hall told reporters.

Hall said he wants to reduce violent gun crime by 10% by December 2026.

“It’s a big goal, but I think we can do it,” he said. “I think this team’s up for it.”

He plans to use “hot spot policing,” hospital-based violence intervention, social network analysis and a gun crime intelligence unit that would use the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ National Integrated Ballistic Information Network to bring shootings down in the city.

Hall, who said he’s investigated or supervised investigations of more than 300 homicides during his career, said he helped implement some of these strategies at the Tucson Police Department and they were successful. The strategies address people who are most at risk for gun violence and those who commit gun violence, Hall said. Once those people are identified, police can prevent shootings, he said.

“Hot spot policing,” or directing officers in areas of the city where gun violence is prevalent, is one strategy. Hall said hot spotting has received criticism because the locations officers where are deployed are often low-income and minority neighborhoods.

“But if you do the appropriate analysis, you’re putting cops where they belong, where the crime is happening,” he said.

Hospital-based violence intervention allows a trusted community member to speak with a gunshot victim and their loved ones at the hospital to reduce criminal involvement and prevent retaliatory shootings.

“If somebody is involved in gun violence either as a victim or offender, we know there’s a 50% chance that they’re also going to be an offender or a victim in the next 12 months,” Hall said at the news conference.

Hall said the program works well in other areas, including in Oakland, California, where Youth ALIVE! Caught in the Crossfire launched in 1994 as the first hospital-based violence intervention program in the country.

Evaluations of the Oakland program found that it lowered recidivism, with clients 70% less likely to be arrested compared to those who did not participate in the program, according to the National League of Cities website. Two percent of clients were re-hospitalized for violence-related injuries in 2021 and 4% of clients were re-injured in 2023.

Hall said hospital-based violence intervention goes hand in hand with social network analysis, or “relationship mapping,” as Hall calls it.

People who associate with a victim or offender of gun violence are most at risk of being a victim or offender in the future, Hall said. Identifying those relationships, by using software to help, allows police to intervene, learn more about those people and offer services they might need.

As the urban hub of Eastern Washington and North Idaho, Spokane needs its own NIBIN machine so police can do its own ballistic analysis, Hall told reporters.

Hall said the only machine in Eastern Washington is at the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory in Cheney, and that lab is backlogged for months.

He said the large number of shootings in Spokane are done by a small number of offenders, and NIBIN has linked multiple shootings to one gun and one offender.

Spokane Police Lt. Nate Spiering agreed.

“Some of our cases, especially over the course of the last year, we’ve seen several incidents tied together by NIBIN,” Spiering said at the news conference. “Now, where that firearm went and who possessed it at the time are focuses of ours.”

Hall said he needs to build a “data pipeline” first to implement his data-driven strategies. That pipeline means he needs to hire information technology and data analysts to capture, organize and make sense of the data they collect. Only one person does that work now, Hall said.

Money, such as grants, and collaboration with other entities are also required to make the strategies come alive. He said he got a $2 million community-based violence intervention grant two years ago in Tucson and he used it to start a hospital-based violence intervention program.

“Some of the strategies that I’ve laid out have decades of research to support you can prevent shootings and homicides, gun-related homicides, with the right mix of solutions,” Hall said.

With a shortage of officers and resources, Hall said prioritizing resources so the department can address shootings while still focusing on lower-level crimes is key.

“You make a decision on what’s important, and I would submit that saving people’s lives is important,” he said.

Hall told reporters police will engage with community leaders, faith groups and local organizations to foster cooperation and violence prevention, as well as to support affected families.

“We know and recognize that law enforcement cannot solve this or any other social problem in our own,” he said. “We have to coproduce safety with the community. We have to walk hand in hand with our community.”

Nowels’ approach in the county

The sheriff’s office recorded seven homicides in 2024, on track with its five-year average and the same amount as in 2023, Nowels said.

Homicides are generally not random acts of violence, he said, and that trend followed suit last year, as only one of the homicides was truly random. Two of the seven homicides were domestic violence-related.

In Spokane, 18 of the 19 homicides had some type of relationship between the victim(s) and suspect(s), police said. Only one was truly random. Seven of the Spokane homicides were domestic-violence related.

Nowels said disrupting gang and drug activity, as well as providing resources to domestic violence victims, are ways the sheriff’s office tries to reduce violence.

The majority of homicides in recent years involved drug use and distribution, but that wasn’t the case in 2024, Nowels said. He said those homicides are a direct result of law enforcement’s limited ability to enforce controlled substance use.

While homicide numbers are on par in the county, aggravated assaults are up 2%, with 329 reported in 2023 and 337 in 2024, Nowels said. The seven-year average is 321.

“I’m super concerned about our aggravated assault numbers,” Nowels said. “Where everybody else is trending down in the country, we in Washington state and we here in Spokane County are trending up.”

Nowels attributed part of the increase to state drug policies, increased drug use and distribution and a lack of accountability for offenders.

Nowels suggested more significant penalties for drug possession. He proposed a two-to-three-month jail sentence for a first drug possession conviction unless the defendant chooses to complete a treatment program.

“We have to make going to treatment a more attractive option than the consequence for not, right?” Nowels said.

Using or possessing drugs is a gross misdemeanor in Washington punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine, according to state law. But, Nowels said there’s almost no penalty for a first-time conviction, especially if a defendant doesn’t have criminal history, and the sentence is typically still light for repeat drug offenders.

Currently, law enforcement is encouraged to offer a referral to drug treatment services in lieu of arrest and jail booking.

Nowels recommended raising the third drug possession/use conviction to a felony if treatment didn’t work the first two times. He still encouraged treatment as well at that point.

He said people are also not coping well with anxiety, which is prevalent across the country, and turning to violence quicker.

“We need to get people to deal with anxiety and stress without using drugs or alcohol,” he said. “That would be great. That would be a first step, right? I mean, gosh, just think what we can reduce.”

Nowels said many of the violent offenders in the county are minors.

“They don’t hesitate to use violence,” he said.

Nowels said the state continues to propose legislation that reduces sentences and doesn’t hold offenders accountable.

“Swift and certain punishment for crimes has always shown to have positive impacts on a community … and we don’t have that right now,” Nowels said.

One House bill, if passed, would allow certain felons in prison to petition the court for a reduced sentence.

Another bill proposed this legislative session seeks to eliminate the sentencing enhancement for certain controlled substance violations and the one for involving a minor in a criminal street gang-related felony.

It would also remove the requirement that courts order certain sentencing enhancements, including multiple for firearm and deadly weapons, to be served consecutively, and instead leaves the matter within the discretion of the court.

“The state has taken a complete hands-off approach to holding juvenile offenders accountable and basically blaming everybody except for the actual offender,” Nowels said. “It’s inexcusable.”

Fixing problems at home is the true way to solve violence, he said.

“In the meantime, until we figure out how to make everybody a perfect parent who doesn’t traumatize their kids or isn’t just a rotten person, we’re gonna have to hold people accountable for the things they do,” he said. “It seems simple to me, and I don’t know why it’s so complicated for others, is if somebody exhibits bad behavior … and they find out that nobody’s going to do anything too serious to ‘em to stop ‘em from doing it again, we shouldn’t be surprised when we keep seeing that behavior continue. But if the consequences are swift and certain, that makes a big difference.”