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It’s a scene that’s played out over and over again in Houston, especially at night:  large scale group arrests.

Night after night, they can make the level of crime seem overwhelming.

And ordinary citizens often get caught in the cross fire.

“Patrick was 20 years old,” Kathy Ballard-Blueford said about her son Patrick, “He was the kind of kid that made everybody laugh.”

On a hot summer night in July 2006, Patrick was getting into his car at a convenience store when someone shot him.

Ballard-Blueford rushed to the scene. “I said Lord Jesus, please don’t let it be my baby. Please don’t let it be my baby. And I got here, and it was my baby,” she said.

Patrick died that night, leaving behind a grieving mother longing for just a few more minutes with her son.

“I would just wrap my arms around him and tell him how much I love him,” said Ballard-Blueford, “How very much I love him.”

But how common are violent crimes like this becoming?

The Houston police department makes no secret that murders have gone up dramatically this year.

But what about other kinds of violent crime?   11News Investigates dug through four years of records on every crime in the city and we uncovered an alarming surge in some of them.  

For example, when we counted the number of assaults with a deadly weapon, not much changed between the first seven months of 2003, with 1,818 incidents and the same time period for 2004, when there were 1,804 incidents.

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11 News Investigates uncovered an alarming surge in crime after going through four years of records.

However, in 2005 a surge began with 1,976 incidents, or a 9 percent increase.  That surge only accelerated during the first seven months of this year, to 2,209 incidents.

All in all, during the last two years combined it added up to a 22 percent increase in this kind of violent crime.

“That’s a big jump,” said criminologist Dr. Clete Snell of the University of Houston-Downtown. He examined our data.“It’s a spike in a very deadly form of violent crime,” he said.

His colleague, Dr. Elizabeth McConnell, agrees.  McConnell is the Chair of the Criminal Justice Program there. “There was an increase,” she said.    McConnell adds it is difficult to know for sure why that increase is taking place.  

Snell said, “It is a big increase when you look overall and you know that years before that, crime rates have been fairly flat.”

So where are the hot spots for this type of crime?

We mapped out all incidents of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in Houston.

Using CrimeStat, a statistical analysis program funded by the National Institute of Justice, we identified several new ones, like a hot spot in northwest Houston off of highway 290 near Antoine Drive. Here in this neighborhood, 32 assaults with deadly weapons occurred in 2006 alone.

Across town, south of Loop 610 off of Cullen Blvd., we found another.

But the worst neighborhood for this crime was in Houston’s southwest side, off of Beechnut and just West of Beltway 8. Also, in the same area but just inside the Beltway, off of Club Creek drive.

The Mayor’s Crime Victims’ Advocate, Andy Kahan, said these crimes leave scars if they don’t kill.

“If you’re a victim particularly of a violent offense,” he said, “that’s something you have to bear the scars from for an entire lifetime.”

But our analysis discovered other crimes on the upswing too: Burglaries of Homes by Forcible Entry are up more than 25 percent over the last two years. Armed robberies of convenience stores are also up, by an astonishing 57 percent this year alone.

So what does HPD have to say about our findings?

We gave our data to Capt. Duane Ready, who shared those numbers with the department’s crime analysis department.

“They don’t have any heartburn over it.  So I would agree it is probably a fair reflection,” he said.

However while Capt. Ready admits that the total amount of violent crimes has increased in the last year in Houston, he points out that the population also increased.

He said when you factor in that population increase, “you see an overall decrease in part one violent crimes of roughly three percent.”

Obviously the biggest recent population surge here was due to evacuees from Hurricane Katrina moving to the Houston area.

But we found the violent crime surges were already on the rise in Houston before the storm ever hit.

“It shows us that violent crime was on the rise even before the hurricane evacuees arrived in Houston,” said Dr. Snell, although he said the evacuees may have also added to the trend.

Capt. Ready said he would look over our data but thinks the department is already ahead of the game.

Ballard-Blueford certainly hopes that’s true so the death of her son will not be in vain.

“This is my baby. This is Patrick Charles Murphy,” she said, holding his photo.