10 gangs, 0.2% of population, driving Durham’s deadliest violence, new data show
Ten active gangs are driving Durham’s worst gun violence.
These groups have roughly 430 to 685 active members, representing just 0.2% of the population in a growing city of over 300,000 residents.
As of June 20, a total of 94 people had been shot this year in Durham, 13 of them fatally.
These statistics provided the backdrop at the Durham Convention Center on Wednesday morning, where city and county leaders gathered with national experts to confront the crisis. The data, compiled in a Gun Violence Prevention Analysis from 2021 to 2025, was presented by researchers from the University of Maryland’s Violence Reduction Center (VRC) and California’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab to help guide the city’s strategy.
Thomas Abt, the founding director of the VRC, said the summit’s immediate goal is short-term intervention. The strategy intentionally bypasses long-term factors like housing insecurity, poverty and racism, which Abt said the city “moves to address in other areas every day.”
“Our focus here will be on saving lives and solving violence, right now,” he told the room.
Durham’s gang dynamics
The city’s shootings are driven by Blood and Crip sets, according to the Policy Lab. Unsurprising to some residents in the room, the analysis showed these two groups were involved in 33% of all homicides and shootings in Durham from 2021 to 2025.
Also, when the researchers filtered the data to look strictly at incidents involving confirmed group members, Blood and Crip subsets were responsible for about 73% of all the group-involved violence in Durham. These conflicts were often retaliatory and heavily concentrated in specific neighborhoods, such as the Cornwallis Road Apartments.
The data also showed during that four-year period:
- About 90% of homicides were gun homicides
- About 21% of homicides involved group/gang conflicts
- At least 52%, and up to 78%, of all homicides involved group/gang members as victims, suspects or both
- Most homicides in Durham involved personal disputes (24%), group-related disputes (17%) and drug-related disputes (11%)
The ‘vast majority’ demographic
The analysis challenges the belief that teenagers are responsible for a majority of street crime.
Instead, researchers found the average age of both victims and suspects in Durham gun violence is 30. These individuals are already deeply entrenched in the legal system, averaging 11 to 12 prior arrests before a shooting occurs.
“If the average age is 30, then we need to think about interventions that are going to be appropriate for someone who’s in their mid-20s to 30 years old, who is highly known to the criminal justice system,” said Reygan Cunningham, a director of the Policy Lab,
The data from 2021-2025 also highlighted a racial disparity: 87% of homicide suspects were Black men, while they represent just 47% of the city’s overall population.
Willis Reginald Hart Jr., a resident in the audience, shared his own experiences with the justice system, urging the room to focus on how targeted opportunity can reshape the trajectory of that 87%.
“You’re talking about me because I’ve already been [through the system], but you can’t tell me, you can’t reach out, and a person can change,” he said. “You got to give him the opportunity before you just try to take his head off.”
Survival realities and environmental demands
The data further revealed that the city’s primary hurdle is an “execution risk” instead of a lack of funding or resources.
Roshanna Humphrey, the director of Durham County’s Justice Services Department, said that during 18 listening sessions with over 400 Durhamites between January and May, residents described hundreds of public programs. However, these programs frequently operate in parallel, running in isolation and often unaware of one another.
Tanya Kelley, of the Cornwallis Road Apartments, highlighted this disconnect and the immediate toll neighborhoods face when violence erupts, noting that after a shooting, the city often takes “so long to pick up the dead body.”
“The children have watched it for so long outside,” Kelley said. “You have to come in and utilize the people who are not getting paid. ... Utilize the people who are willing to cry with people, who help wipe up blood.”
Kelley and other community members said not discussing the root causes of the issues, and including the street-involved youth in the conversations, was contradictory to the summit’s goal.
What the city needs to do, residents said, is to fund and deploy trusted messengers like former gang members with neighborhood ties to reach the most vulnerable, high-risk residents. That approach remains a complex debate, however, as the city and county previously tried this, spending millions on the Bull City United program only to disband it after several employees got arrested.
Mayor Leo Williams reminded the audience that the analysts and researchers were just facilitators and the true work of saving Durham’s streets belongs to the people.
“This is our work,” he said.
The remaining two days of the summit are reserved for members of the working group, which consists of 30 leaders from across the city and county, to recommend specific strategies that Durham will pursue.
Presentations from the first day of the summit with a breakdown of the city’s gun violence data will be available at durhamnc.gov.
This story was originally published June 25, 2026 at 8:14 AM with the headline "10 gangs, 0.2% of population, driving Durham’s deadliest violence, new data show."