| By Big Radio News Staff |
Rock County has seen at least one shooting a week since the beginning of March, and the bullets continue to fly.
A WCLO News inventory of police reports shows that between March 1 and May 1, communities throughout Rock County have seen at least nine reported shootings, two of which were fatal.
The most recent shooting, which rolled out Tuesday afternoon in an east-side Beloit neighborhood, left a juvenile injured with bullet wounds.
In all, four of the reported shootings have caused injuries. Monday night, a Janesville house got peppered by bullets in a shooting that police are still investigating. Sunday, a man was arrested after he pointed a loaded gun at a bouncer’s face in a town of Beloit bar.
Janesville police Sgt. Aaron Dammen stopped short of calling recent shootings an uptick in gun violence, but he acknowledged he’s seen more gun crimes in Janesville in the last five years than he saw in his first twenty years on the force.
He says the uptick lines up with regional trends in gun violence, but he said there is no single common thread between individual gun crimes.
Dammen says police know there are far more people here who possess guns–both legally and illegally– than a decade ago.
He says it’s alarming how many traffic stops and warrant searches now end with police confiscating guns possessed illegally, including by convicted felons.
A rise in armed standoffs and armed, violent encounters in a few recent cases has prompted deadly force by police.
In an apparent knife attack Sunday in Beloit, and in a separate standoff with a person armed with a gun in early March in Janesville, police fatally shot a person considered a suspect. Both those incidents have left officers on administrative leave while the state Department of Justice investigates.
Dammen says local departments are fortunate to have multiple trained crisis negotiators to deal with a troubling rise in armed standoffs in residential neighborhoods, some of which he says seem rooted in mental illness.
Beloit Police Chief Andre Sayles and a city of Beloit spokesperson have not immediately responded to WCLO News inquiries on the recent spate of gun violence in Beloit.
