AUSTIN — Malika Slaughter was waiting outside of Michelle Clark High School on the first day of the school year Monday when she noticed neighbors staging a press conference to discuss a recent uptick in local shootings.

The press conference caught her attention, as Slaughter said the shootings in recent weeks concerned her, especially with her son starting back up at school. In the last five days, at least six people were shot, including one fatally, within a mile of the school at 5101 W. Harrison St., according to Violence Interrupters, Inc., whose volunteers are deploying to Austin corridors frequented by students to keep them safe this back-to-school season.

“It’s been a lot going on, but personally, I keep him busy during the summer,” Slaughter said of her son.

The West Side has seen an increase in shootings over the last month compared to the same time period last year, when shootings in the area and citywide reached historic lows.

Since July 29, the community areas of Austin, North Lawndale and East and West Garfield Park saw 49 people shot, a nearly 20 percent increase over the previous year, according to the city’s Violence Prevention Dashboard. Seventeen of those victims were in East and West Garfield Park, a nearly 42 percent increase over the same time period last year.

That span includes incidents that have shocked the community, including the shooting of two teen brothers in South Austin, the fatal shooting of a 64-year-old woman and a 25-year-old man in West Garfield Park and the killing of 30-year-old mother Yolanda Chaytor outside a West Garfield Park hot dog stand.

Local leaders have called for an end to the violence.

“Our community mourns the loss of innocent life and our hearts go out to their families,” Ald. Jason Ervin (28th) said in a statement after the shooting of the 64-year-old woman. “We cannot allow those who commit such disgraceful, senseless crimes to get away with them.”

Despite the bump in violence in recent weeks, violence prevention organizers on the West Side said their work is still showing dividends.

Since the start of the year, the number of shooting victims in the four community areas that largely make up the West Side are down 5 percent, with 258 this year compared with 272 over the same period last year. Anti-violence workers are hopeful that the promising trend can continue over the longterm despite the recent uptick.

“We’re in a difficult stretch, and we experience these each year, but people need to understand that progress is real, it’s just fragile,” said Edwin Galletti, vice president of violence intervention and prevention services at the North Lawndale-based violence interruption organization UCAN. “The data can tell us that violence has decreased, but you can’t use statistics to tell a mother or a senior how safe they should feel.”

Shifting Types Of Violence

The work that groups like UCAN and The Institute for Nonviolence Chicago perform led to a historic 60-year-low in shootings last year, with much of that drop in violence led by West Side neighborhoods.

Nekenya Hardy, the associate director of outreach and intervention at The Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, told Block Club earlier this year that the group’s success in driving down shootings came largely from the work to reduce gang or group-on-group violence.

The same is true at UCAN, where outreach workers leverage their credibility in the neighborhood as well as past affiliations to reach young people and mediate conflicts. The workers have had success creating nonaggression agreements amid feuds and enrolling people in workforce development programs to get them off the streets.

With the reduction in shootings caused by longstanding conflicts, spontaneous shootings — such as during robberies, carjackings and domestic violence — have grown to dominate much of the current violence on the West Side, Hardy said. That includes the killing of Chaytor, who was fatally shot Aug. 16 after an argument in the parking lot of an Original Maxwell Street in West Garfield Park.

“With these types of incidents, it’s hard for us to prevent them because we don’t have time to even get knowledge of them,” Hardy said.

Another issue has been teen gatherings and parties attended by young people, which have been a major contributing factor to shootings this summer, Hardy said. Several gatherings either start in a central area like Downtown and migrate towards the West Side before ending in violence or just spontaneously begin on the West Side. Due to how quickly the gatherings occur, Hardy said his team is doing all they can to be proactive.

“We don’t have a two- to three-day notification [of gatherings], so we don’t have the CPD forces or manpower to hold 200 to 300 kids,” Hardy said. “We just got to really just let them hang out until it ends. And if you look at the data, pretty much all the teen trends ended in a shooting.”

That includes a teen gathering July 4th weekend in West Garfield Park, where seven teens and young adults were shot, leaving one in critical condition. Slaughter’s son was trapped in a family member’s home near the gathering, she said.

“We couldn’t get out because the crowd was so big,” Slaughter said. “We were stuck there for about 30 minutes trying to get the car out. They were jumping on cars, all types of crazy stuff.”

As the Institute for Nonviolence works to handle the spontaneous shootings, Hardy said his team is working with Crisis Prevention and Response Units and police throughout the 11th, 25th and 15th districts to be aware of gatherings and when dispersed teens could be traveling to West Side communities. Additionally, the organization is working to provide teens an alternative way to gather through regular Light in the Night block parties. UCAN also offers similar events.

Taking A Long View On Violence Reduction

While there have been more than 250 people shot on the West Side this year, that is over 700 fewer than through the same period in 2016, which was one of the most violent years in recent history, according to the city’s violence dashboard.

Organizers said that this massive progress over the last decade is their north star as they continue violence prevention work into the fall.

“We’re going to treat these shootings just like we were treating them 10 years ago when the shootings were really high,” said Pablo Galvez, a manager at BUILD Chicago, an Austin-based nonviolence and social services group. “We’re going to be stepping up our visibility in the communities, even at night … we’re going to go back to square one.”