Hours after another shooting claimed the life of a teenage boy on Monday, Leo Williams, mayor of Durham, N.C., slammed the “status quo” of the city’s anti-violence efforts.

“Whether the headlines report a fatality or a close call, the trauma to our community is the same,” Williams wrote in a Facebook post Monday afternoon. “I know you are frustrated, and I know you are scared. I am, too.”

Durham is praised by 84% of residents as an “excellent or good place to live,” according to city surveys, but several shootings in the past week highlight a paradox.

—Monday, Feb. 16: Hours before the Durham City Council meeting Monday night, a boy was shot and killed on South Alston Avenue. Police have not released his name, but social media posts show family members mourning the loss of a 17-year-old named Jamier.

—Sunday, Feb. 15: Two teenagers were shot and injured on South Roxboro Street, the same street where a man was shot and killed Thursday, Feb. 12. Police have not released the man’s name.

—Wednesday, Feb. 11: Tavarus Joyner, 47, was shot and killed on East Umstead Street, and a 13-year-old boy was injured in a drive-by shooting on Rosedale Avenue.

The City Council has been working to prioritize gun violence, including by creating a “whole-of-government” road map with Durham County.

“We have a long-term strategy to where we’re going to be focusing on bringing all the possible resources we can together to bring down crime, violent crime, in this community,” Williams said at Monday’s meeting.

“But the question we have to ask ourselves (is) are we going to really do this or not?” he said. “Because that’s the long-term plan. There isn’t anything right now other than the status quo. "We can’t social work our way out of this. We can’t restorative justice our way our of this.”

As of Feb. 7, the Durham Police Department’s most recent report on shootings in the city, 15 people had been shot in 2026.

Four of those shootings had been fatal, and five of the total people shot by that date had been 18 to 20 years old, the statistics show.

‘Mayor, what are you going to do?’

“I woke up this morning to, I think maybe 300 comments. Most of the comments were, ‘Mayor, what are you going to do? Mayor, you need to do something. The mayor isn’t doing enough,’” Williams said Monday night.

He said he partly blamed television shows like “Mayor of Kingstown,” where there is a mayor “who has almighty power to just do whatever.”

“That’s not real life in democracy,” Williams said.

He responded to the criticism by saying he could not solve the issue alone and challenged critics to come with “real solutions” instead of “complaints.”

One commenter on the mayor’s social media post, Kierra Woods, told Williams that there were several programs working address violence in Durham that needed more support from the city, like the Boys & Girls Club. She also listed programs for after-school arts and sports, mentorship programs, “living-wage youth employment pipelines, trauma-informed care in schools” and a similar restorative program to Bull City United.

“If we are serious about long-term safety, we have to invest just as boldly in prevention as we do in policing,” she wrote. “Prevention does not make headlines, but it changes outcomes. Young people need spaces, mentors, jobs, and opportunity not just monitoring and response. Surveillance tools may react to violence, but they do not stop it from beginning.”

Durham has had several programs with a goal to end gun violence that have ended or did not come full circle. Williams backed all the most recent programs the City Council majority ended.

Last month, the city rejected the Durham Police Department’s proposal to contract with Peregrine Technologies on a Real-Time Data Center to enhance operations and solve crimes faster. Critics said it posed a threat to immigrants and marginalized residents.

Two years ago, the Durham City Council ended ShotSpotter, a gunshot-alert system, over concerns it had not decreased gun violence and could lead to overpolicing in Black and brown communities.

The city also disbanded Bull City United, which employed former gang members as “violence interrupters,” after some of its workers got arrested.

What City Council members said Monday

All seven council members spoke about the gun violence at Monday night’s meeting. Some also mentioned homelessness and the need for more collaborative efforts to address the problems.

“It is hard to sit up here with the amount of violence and crime that we have had just in this past week,” member Chelsea Cook said. “Really any violence is disruptive, but we know that a lot of it is concentrated in certain neighborhoods, and we also understand the implications of that on health care, on children’s abilities to grow and develop, and on folks’ abilities to be economically sustainable moving forward.”

Member Carl Rist noted some of the shootings happened near the Cornwallis Road Public Housing Complex, which is owned by the Durham Housing Authority. Rist said the city’s current gap for housing to meet the needs of residents living at or below 80% of the area median income (about $65,000 a year for a single person) is 12,000 homes.

“This is not something we can accept in Durham, that this is way too much violence. No one deserves that kind of fear,” Rist said.

New member Shanetta Burris extended her condolences to the families and said she wanted to ensure the city’s youth could live, graduate from school, and attend their prom and college.

“No one has a right to play or take a life in our city,” Burris said. “We know that some of the tools we have are going to be reactive, but I want to challenge all of us to be proactive and making sure that none of these children have access to a gun and that we’re ensuring they actually get to see adulthood.”

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