The Campus/Community Coalition of the city of Binghamton met Wednesday afternoon to discuss how to deal with recent incidents of crime Downtown.

The open-forum conversation, held in City Council Chambers, came on the heels of an incident in which a 20-year-old male allegedly stabbed and killed a 30-year-old male, and left another wounded.

Addressing concerns that the State Street bar scene incubated the violence, Police Chief Joseph Zikuski said the incident could have happened anywhere.

“It’s not necessarily tied to the bars,” he said. “Unfortunately that’s where it happened.”

Some community members at the forum were concerned that local media’s representation of the violence is overstating its actual prominence and harming the business of bar owners.

Mayor Matt Ryan agreed that the prevalence of violence was exaggerated.

He acknowledged that there was a recent string of highly publicized events, but said, “That doesn’t mean that we’re all of a sudden a completely unsafe city.”

Ryan said the trend for crime this year is actually going down.

Zikuski addressed concerns that bars were not properly carding, but said that forgeries have become much more difficult to spot, even for experts.

Recounting an experience with an investigator from the Department of Motor Vehicles who was checking IDs with city police, Zikuski said, “[a] DMV investigator was with us and he couldn’t tell if the license was real or not.”

He preferred to focus on the instances of violence, saying, “When you mix kids — whether they’re 20 or 23 — with booze, there’s going to be a problem.”

Lawrence Shea, the owner of Tom and Marty’s, wanted the city to further investigate the specific causes of this recent string of violence. “Is there something [Downtown] in the last year that’s different?” he asked.