Why gun violence concerns are rising in Durham’s Latino community

The number of Hispanic people being shot in Durham is rising even as total shootings in the city have declined, police statistics show.

A total of 78 people had been shot as of June 3, the most recent number on the Durham Police Department’s website.

Black non-Hispanic people make up two-thirds of this year’s shooting victims. Twelve victims, about 15% have been Hispanic, roughly the percentage of Durham’s population that is Hispanic.

But concerns are up, especially after three teens, all 16 year-old Honduran-Americans, were shot March 21 near Brogden Middle School. Angel Canales and Osmar Banegas were killed. The third teen survived.

Two were first-year students at Riverside High School; the third had previously attended it.

Jorge Benitez-Mendoza, 18, who is also Hispanic, was charged as a suspect in the shooting.

Access to firearms

In an interview with The News & Observer, Osmar Banegas’ brother blamed gun violence in the Latino community on a mix of factors.

“There’s been a big increase of gang and gun violence among youth, which is known about,” said Kevin Banegas, 21, speaking in Spanish. “But beyond gang violence, it’s the access that young people have to firearms.”

Guns have become so easy to get that it’s like shopping for produce at the supermarket, said Banegas, who graduated from Riverside in 2019.

“Young people are lied to, and they believe that a gun makes them powerful,” he said.

Osmar Banegas came from a loving home but, like many Hispanic students in Durham Public Schools struggled academically and got caught up in petty conflicts that turned into fights, his brother said. He became prone to bad influences that threatened and ultimately took his life.

Gun violence a ‘moral issue’

“It was heart-wrenching,” Father Jacek Orzechowski said of Canales’ funeral at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church near downtown Durham. “As a church, we try to raise awareness of gun violence as a moral issue.”

Latinos are the majority of the parishioners at the church, which Canales attended with his family, Orzechowski said.

“(The community) is being disproportionately affected,” he said. “There is a need to help young people deal with the compounded trauma and mental health issues.”

In December, a 15-year-old Hispanic boy was fatally in eastern Durham. A suspect still hasn’t been charged, police told The N&O.

Proportion of Latino shooting victims

The number of Latinos shot in Durham has increased since 2020, even as the total number of people shot in the city has decreased.

▪ 2019: 190 total people shot with 21 Latino victims, making up 11%. Four fatal victims.

▪ 2020: 318 total people shot with 20 Latino victims, making up 6%. Two fatal victims.

▪ 2021: 278 total people shot with 33 Latino victims, making up 12%. Six fatal victims.

▪ 2022: 247 total people shot with 35 Latino victims, making up 17%. Five fatal victims.

From 2019 to 2022, the average age of the Latinos fatally shot in Durham was 26 years old, with victims ranging from from 15 to 46 years old, according to police data requested by The N&O.

Behind the slowly rising violence

Rosa Gonzalez-Guarda, an associate professor at the Duke University School of Nursing, studies gun violence in the Triangle’s Latino immigrant population

“We know that if we don’t do something, it’s going to go higher, because our population demographics are changing.” she said. “There’s going to be more U.S.-born Latinos in North Carolina.”

Gonzalez-Guarda says acculturative stress, or acculturation stress, plays a role in gun violence. It involves conflicts people have when they must adjust to a new culture in a new country, such as dealing with language barriers.

“We focus on risk (of violence) a lot, but we don’t focus enough on the decay of the good stuff that (Latino immigrants) have — the protective factors,” she said. “For the Latino community, it’s that strong family network and that strong community network, that really protects us against bad experiences and is really good for our health. But we live in systems that are challenging this.”

“We come to this country and we start working, and the cost is our family,” said Gonzalez-Guarda, who is Cuban-American.

Rut Avila, the Hispanic Liaison officer at the Durham Police Department, sees these issues in her work.

“Really what I’ve seen is a lot of parents not being able to take control over their kids, to be honest,” she said in an interview. “I’ve received so many calls from the parents calling me about their 15 year-old, that they’re just acting out of control and them not being able to discipline them anymore.”

After the deadly triple shooting near Brogden Middle School, a vigil was held in downtown Durham and a virtual meeting was held by LATIN-19, a Latino health volunteer group created by Duke health care experts that involves community activists and others.

“There are many fathers in our community who have been assaulted (with guns) at their homes, and we’re not talking about adults here, but young men with access to firearms,” Iván Almonte, a Durham activist, said in Spanish at an April LATIN-19 meeting. “This has gotten out of control.”

Nationally, 27% percent of Hispanic people in the U.S. report they or a close friend or family member has experienced gun violence in the past five years, compared with only 13% of non-Hispanic white Americans, the Associated Press reported.

“We had a lot of growth within our community,” Avila said of the gradual increase in violence. “There’s an easy access to all these weapons that our community is facing. They’re really just using them to retaliate against small problems that they might have with each other.”

Avila said she works with gun and gang violence prevention efforts such as Project BUILD, a city and county program, and does youth outreach work in schools.

Durham police officer vacancies

Officer shortages are another issue, Avila said.

Bilingual officers have consistently made up less than 10% of the Durham police force, according to the most recent statistics shared with The N&O.

“We need more officers that can help assist those in the language barrier and to be able to bridge that gap that we do have,” she said. “I can’t do it alone. These positions do need to be taken by a bilingual officer sometimes, because a lot of information gets missed in the translation.”

The police department was short around 100 officers in May, about 20% of the force, the N&O reported previously.