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“This is not normal,” Stark said, after two shootings occurred within earshot of his apartment on two consecutive nights in December. Since then, Stark has taken up listening to a police scanner and monitoring local Facebook groups to scrape together a better sense of what’s going on in his neighborhood.
Because the Long Beach Police Department does not regularly release statistics about shootings, it’s been hard for Stark to quantify his gut feeling about a spike in shootings, but data obtained by the Long Beach Post through public records requests shows he’s right: Gun violence in the city has been surging.