Former King County sheriff: ‘If you start a gang unit, gang crime will go off the charts’
Aug 2, 2024, 3:17 PM
An Auburn Police Department vehicle can be seen on a road. (Photo courtesy of KIRO 7)
(Photo courtesy of KIRO 7)
The question of gang violence has been raised as a rash of shootings involving teenagers have been seen around King County. On Thursday, Auburn Police Chief Mark Cailler confirmed the gun violence plaguing Auburn is gang-related.
More details: Auburn PD confirms rash of gun violence is gang-related but there is no gang unit
On Friday, “The Gee and Ursula Show” on KIRO Newsradio had former King County Sheriff John Urquhart on to speak about gang violence. His response took co-host Ursula Reutin by surprise.
Do we have a gang problem in Western Washington?
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Urquhart said. “As soon as you start talking about gangs, you add a racial element to crimes, and I think that’s a very dangerous thing to do, what we do have is a youth gun, or youth violence problem and that’s what we need to to address.”
“If they’re in a gang or not, doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t care what the color of the finger is that pulls that trigger. I want to catch that shooter. And that’s what I’m going to do if I possibly can as a police officer or a sheriff,” he continued.
Urquhart added that King County had a gang unit until a year or two before he came into office, around 2010. He said when he got into office, the first thing people told him was that he needed to bring the gang unit back. However, Urquhart told them as long as he was sheriff King County was not going to have a gang unit, adding there were several reasons for his decision.
“If you think you have a gang problem in your community and you start a gang unit, I guarantee you gang crime will go off the charts, absolutely off the charts, because every single crime that involves a person of color, gets listed, that box gets checked, as a gang crime, and it may or may not be a gang crime,” he explained.
Former King County sheriff: ‘You need an emphasis on street shootings’
Urquhart went into more detail, using a shooting between two people, who identify as being in separate gangs, as an example. Would officers report that shooting as a gang crime when it could be related to something different, such as one disrespecting the other’s girlfriend or because of money or something else, he said.
“You just don’t know, my job, the job of all police ought to be to solve these crimes,” Urquhart added. “And you don’t need a gang unit to be able to do that, what you need is an emphasis on street crime, on shootings.”
Urquhart said if the Auburn police chief wants to slow gun violence, he needs to convene a task force of all the cities in the south end, along with the sheriff’s office, the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“Get them all together and coordinate their response to the shootings,” he said. “We did that in 2017 and shooting crimes just dropped off the charts. That’s the way to do it. Not this knee-jerk reaction that ‘Oh, my God, we have young black people, or young Hispanic people, shooting others, we need to have a gang unit.’ That’s the wrong approach, as far as I’m concerned.”
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Urquhart added that a gang unit could make the prospect of joining a gang look more attractive to youth.
“I think that if we emphasize gangs and how important they are and we have a gang unit, that just makes it more alluring for young people to get into this gang,” he said. “‘Oh, look, I’m a member of a gang and the cops are after me.'”
To hear more, as Urquhart goes into detail about the type of gang violence seen in Western Washington, click the episode below:
Listen to Gee Scott and Ursula Reutin weekday mornings from 9 a.m.- noon on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.
Julia Dallas is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read her stories here. Follow Julia on X here and email her here.
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