Four people were killed and at least another four injured in a shooting at a house party Thursday night in the San Francisco Bay Area, Police Chief David Cook of Orinda, California, tells CNN.
Police were “being overwhelmed by the crowd where the shooting happened” on Halloween night, they told CNN affiliate KPIX.
The Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office announced the casualties in a tweet on Friday, Nov. 1. It said it is working with the police department in the city of Orinda, where the shooting took place. Neither department has released further details.
Orinda Police Department and Contra Costa County Office of the Sheriff are working a multiple shooting in Orinda. Investigation is active. Details coming later.
— CoCo Sheriff PIO (@cocosopio) November 1, 2019
Orinda homicide update – four fatalities, several injuries. More details coming.
— CoCo Sheriff PIO (@cocosopio) November 1, 2019
Video from the scene posted by KGO-TV showed multiple patients being loaded into ambulances as others limped away from the scene. Video also showed police talking to people who appeared injured.
A dispatcher at the sheriff’s office said the public information officer would release more information later this morning, but he did not provide a time.
Facts About Crime in the United States
Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).
The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.
The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.
The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.
While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.
The CNN Wire and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
