A recent effort launched by Crime Stoppers of Houston hopes to find solutions to school violence hiding within data on guns brought to campuses. To achieve this goal officials with Crime Stoppers are examining all cases in Harris County where a person has been charged with bringing a gun on to a school campus.
“We want to do the deep dive, we want to ask the difficult questions and we want to understand why this is happening,” said Crime Stoppers CEO, Rania Mankarious. “Is it an issue of communities feeling unsafe where people are bringing weapons, or people feeling the need to protect themselves, or are there mental health issues that are untreated? Kids who are angry, adults who are angry.”
According to data compiled by Crime Stoppers from 2022 through March of this year, there have been 83 cases of a person charged with bringing a gun on to a school campus. Director of Victim Services for Crime Stoppers, Andy Kahan said the cases he’s reviewed show this happening at elementary school campuses all the way up to college campuses.
“There’s no concentrated area, you can’t say that it’s happening in this part of town, it’s happening in this school district; pretty much every school district is represented in one way or the other,” said Kahan.
Kahan said they are just beginning to review these cases for the ‘why’ and how the guns make it past the front doors of a school.
“This was one high school here where they were basically passing a backpack around with a loaded pistol,” said Kahan. “You have someone taking a selfie with the gun in the bathroom.”
Kahan points out they are only looking at Harris County cases at this point and those cases only involve those 17 or older. Kahan said he’s working on a way to get data involving juveniles. Crime Stoppers is also examining the outcome of all these cases in criminal court. Kahan and Mankarious said the plan is to bring their findings to the state legislature during its next session in the hopes this type of effort can be expanded statewide.
“Nobody is stopping to do sort of, expand the landscape and say, ‘wait a minute, what’s happening and why?’” said Mankarious.
The Texas Education Agency shows last school year there were 381 firearms violations statewide, 94 of those were in Region 4, which cover the Houston area. TEA officials said each violation could involve multiple students and schools are not required to report the specific reason why a gun was brought to campus.
