Two juveniles were wounded in a shooting Thursday evening in Tacoma, with police saying both suffered grazing wounds while they were outside when gunfire erupted. The shooting happened around 5:50 p.m. in the 1700 block of South 37th Street, an address that sits directly alongside Lincoln High School and Lincoln Park in the city's Lincoln International District.
According to KOMO News, Tacoma police did not release the victims' ages or genders, and investigators said they had no information about a suspect as of Thursday night. Police described the available details as limited, and the scene remained active as officers continued working the case into the evening.
A Street Corridor With A Troubled Recent History
Thursday's shooting is not the first time gunfire has struck this stretch of South 37th Street near Lincoln High School. In June 2025, a shooting in front of the school wounded a teenager and forced a modified lockdown, and the area also saw a juvenile shooting in the 600 block in September 2024, according to the research record compiled from FOX 13 Seattle's reporting. Taken together, the incidents point to a corridor that has repeatedly drawn gunfire involving young people, even as the rest of the city has trended in a different direction.
That broader trend, per data released by the City of Tacoma alongside Tacoma Police Department statistics in July 2026, shows violent crime — including homicides, aggravated assaults, and robberies — continuing to decline through the first half of the year. The same survey found the share of Tacoma households reporting they had been crime victims fell from 35% in 2024 to 22% in 2026, a sign of citywide improvement even as individual neighborhoods like the Lincoln corridor continue to see flashes of violence.
Countywide Numbers Tell A More Complicated Story
Zoom out to Pierce County, and the picture darkens somewhat. An official county proclamation issued in June 2026 recorded 49 homicides across Pierce County in 2025, with roughly 71% of them committed with firearms, and it specifically flagged a troubling surge in violent crime involving both juvenile victims and juvenile suspects, according to the Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs. That proclamation also cited a 2025 Washington State University study finding that firearms have become the leading cause of death for Washington youth ages 11 to 18, surpassing motor vehicle collisions as the top killer of high-school-aged children in urban areas.
Statewide figures compiled by EveryStat in March 2026 add further context: firearms are involved in 72% of all homicides in Washington, and an average of 69 children and teens die by guns in the state each year, with just over half of those deaths classified as homicides. Those numbers help explain why even a shooting resulting in non-life-threatening wounds — as Thursday's appears to have been — draws heightened concern when it happens steps from a high school campus.
What Washington Law Says About Juveniles And Guns
If a suspect is eventually identified as a minor, state law lays out specific consequences for unlawful firearm possession. Under RCW 13.40.193, a juvenile adjudicated for unlawfully possessing a firearm faces a mandatory minimum of 10 days confinement along with required participation in evidence-based programs such as aggression replacement therapy or functional family therapy, according to the Washington State Legislature.
Current law also requires a juvenile to be convicted five separate times of unlawful gun possession before a judge can impose more than 30 days in detention — a threshold state prosecutors and lawmakers are actively pushing to lower to three convictions to allow earlier intervention, per reporting from OPB. That legislative debate underscores the tension local officials face: responding to repeat youth gun offenses while operating within a juvenile justice framework built around rehabilitation rather than lengthy detention.
Local Response Beyond Policing
The City of Tacoma has leaned on both enforcement and prevention to address the pattern. Tacoma's Neighborhood and Community Services department runs a youth violence reduction initiative built on the federal OJJDP Comprehensive Gang Model, partnering with community organizations to provide youth development, mentoring, mental health support, and intervention services. On the enforcement side, Tacoma police have operated a data-driven Violent Crime Reduction Plan since June 2022, developed with criminologists from the University of Texas at San Antonio, which directs increased patrol visibility and hot-spot policing toward areas with elevated violent crime.
Thursday's shooting adds to a string of recent gun violence cases in the region. Just a day earlier, a man was killed in a Parkland shooting marking Pierce County's second homicide in 48 hours, and Hoodline has previously reported on other Tacoma-area shootings involving teenagers, including a July shooting in Wright Park that left a teen with a leg wound. As of Thursday night, Tacoma police had not identified a suspect or motive in the South 37th Street shooting, and the investigation remained active.
