Ask Sonny Jackson what he thinks about the "Summer of Violence" and you'll get a blunt off-the-cuff reply.

It was a "myth," said Jackson, who covered many of the shootings that occurred in the summer of 1993 as a news photographer for 9News.

Jackson, who now works as a spokesman for the Denver Police Department, quickly qualifies his remark, noting that myth is probably the wrong word.

There were, in fact, a lot of innocent children and bystanders killed and wounded by gang violence that year, he said.

But he has a point. When Denver's crime statistics were totaled at the end of 1993, the 76 homicides recorded that year represented a 22.5 percent decrease from the previous year.

And the number of aggravated assaults were essentially the same as the year before.

So was there a "Summer of Violence" or was it just a media myth?

Denver Police Division Chief Armedia Gordon was a sergeant in the homicide unit in 1993. She, for one, does not consider the level of gang violence that summer a myth.

"There were horrendous cases," she said, reciting the names of people who were killed by stray bullets that summer. "And the cases just kept coming."

The statistics involving juvenile violence were on the rise in 1993.

Between 1987 to 1992, the number of murders committed by kids under 17 had increased by 55 percent and the number of juvenile aggravated assaults nearly doubled.

University of Colorado sociologist Mark Pogrebin, who lived in Park Hill that summer, remembers his neighbors hiring private security guards.

What made the violence different was the way it affected middle-class residents in areas that were not typically scarred by violence, such as the Denver Zoo neighborhood, Pogrebin said.

For such anti-gang activists as the Rev. Leon Kelly, there is a cruel irony to how once gang violence moved away from those areas, they also fell away from public consciousness.

"I don't think we're better off as a city now," Kelly said last week. "I think youth violence still exists. We as a society have become so prone to violence that it has to be something out of the norm for us to even take notice."