Residents in a Durham neighborhood say they have experienced seven shootings in seven weeks.
Not all of the East Durham shootings resulted in someone getting shot.
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East Durham residents took their concerns last week to the Durham City Council, playing audio recordings of the gunfire in their neighborhood.
“We are seeing this dramatic increase in gun violence, and it's actually quite amazing that more people haven't gotten shot or killed with the recurrence and the level of violence that we're experiencing,” East Durham resident Yohanan Assefa said.
The recordings provided by residents show the violence occurring at all times of the day, including mornings, afternoons and overnight.
“On Saturday mornings, when parents are out playing with their kids, there's a drive-by shooting. On Sunday evenings, [when] we're on our porch just hanging out, there's a drive-by shooting,” Assefa said.
Assefa described hitting the floor whenever she hears a bang, and her fear when a car drives by her home quickly, never sure if a bullet could come through her walls.
“We just feel like we are hostages in our own home, but the sad thing is our homes don't even feel safe anymore because there are bullets that are entering homes and there are people that are getting shot,” she said.
At Thursday’s Durham City Council work session, she and others asked the city for action.
Durham Mayor Leonardo Williams called the recordings “disturbing.”
"I don't want to become desensitized to this reality. Yes, crime is trending down, but it's not trending down in the areas that I need it to be most,” Williams said. "If one person is dying, it's way too much."
The Durham Police Department provides weekly shooting data. The most recent data from Oct. 4 shows 130 people have been shot in Durham so far this year, compared to 173 at this point last year, and 150 in 2023.
While DPD’s period-to-date crime tables show an 18% decrease from 2024 in all violent crimes, which is a category that compiles homicides, rapes, robbery, and aggravated assaults, criminal homicides specifically have increased from 2024 by nearly 18%.
Across the city in 2025, there have been 33 criminal homicides; that category includes crimes such as vehicular homicides. As of this point in 2024, there had been 28.
Williams said change is on the way. He points to the expansion of the HEART program and its focus on proactive outreach. He also says the new Office of Survivor Care creates an opportunity for to be more proactive rather than have a reactive response. Williams said he wants to see more.
“What I'll be working on is making sure that we can have, just as we have on the responsive side, a robust proactive apparatus to address the prevention of violent crime,” Williams said.
The city of Durham and Durham County have a joint meeting scheduled for Thursday morning, where Williams says elected leaders will discuss the issues.
“We've been bringing a lot of partners to the table,” Williams said. “We're finally going to announce the plan to work with all of those in a holistic setting.”
Those partners include the University of Virginia and local nonprofits.
Assefa and her neighbors say intervention cannot come soon enough.
"This is a very complex and systemic problem, and we also want the city to implement holistic programs that address the systemic nature of this problem,” Assefa said. "We want the city to take action now, not in a year or two, because it is now that people are being terrorized and people's lives are being lost."
The charts compare Durham Police Department data through Oct. 4, 2025, on shooting incidents year-to-date during a three-year period. A shooting incident is defined as an event reported to police involving the criminal discharge of a firearm, and does not include accidental or self-inflicted shootings.