A week of shootings, stabbings, sorrow and anger has left people in Liverpool wondering whether it is safe to leave their homes.

On the same night that nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel was killed by a masked gunman who had forced his way into her home in Dovecot, five miles away, a woman in her 50s was found with a fatal stab wound in her chest in a pub car park in Kirkby.

On Sunday, 28-year-old council worker Ashley Dale died after being shot in the Old Swan area of the city in what police believe was a case of mistaken identity.

Police are still searching for two people who fled on electric bikes after Sam Rimmer, who was in his early 20s, was shot in Toxteth on 16 August.

Neighbours of Olivia have expressed their despair. Paul Davies, who has three children around the same age, said he was “absolutely shocked” by the incidents across the city.

“Liverpool has been absolutely crazy with guns and knives this week. It is absolutely crazy and it needs to stop,” he told Sky News.

Olivia was killed 15 years to the day after the fatal shooting in the city of 11-year-old Rhys Jones, a young Everton fan who was caught in the crossfire between two criminal gangs as he left the Croxteth Fir Tree pub car park.

Another neighbour who lives behind Olivia’s home and heard the gunshots, said: ‘“It doesn’t matter where you are these days, it’s like everyone’s got a gun. I don’t feel safe anywhere.”

Police are examining possible links with organised crime gangs in the city, the Guardian understands, but remain concerned that witnesses may not wish to come forward due to fears of retribution.

DCS Mark Kameen said police will “do everything to protect” witnesses. “All the information that we do receive, as you can imagine, will be treated with absolute confidence – we will do everything to protect those people who do come forward with information,” he said.

The increasing influence of gangs from the north-west over the rest of England and Wales was identified by the National Crime Agency in 2020. By sifting data from an encrypted chat service gathered as part of Operation Venetic, officers from the NCA’s national firearms threat centre found that more than 70% of all links to weapons examined led back to Liverpool and north-west England.

Analysis of encrypted messages from a communications system used by criminals – known as EncroChat – showed that the city has become the pre-eminent location for top-tier gangs sourcing high-volume imports of drugs and automatic weapons.

Senior NCA firearms officers said that the city’s geography, its demographics, history of serious organised crime, and the willingness of gang members to embrace the latest criminal innovations were behind its rise.

Matt Perfect, the firearms threat lead for the NCA, said at the time that intelligence from EncroChat had offered a unique insight into how the criminal landscape was controlled outside the M25.

“The evidence is that the north-west groups pretty much dominate the rest of the [criminal] communities in the UK,” he told the Observer.

Focus will now fall upon the gangs that have operated across Liverpool for years, and whose names are widely known.

They include Manc Joey, a gang that ran heroin and crack cocaine to Exeter in 2021; the Deli Mob of north Liverpool, which operated a ruthless drug dealing operation around Everton; the Croxteth Crew, whose gang member Sean Mercer was 16 when he was found guilty of murdering Rhys; and the Strand gang, from the Norris Green area of the city, who recruited children as young as 12 to be “soldiers’.

Emily Spurrell, the Merseyside police and crime commissioner, called for greater resources from central government if police are to curb the current crime spree.

“We are still 456 officers short of where we were in 2010, and that’s a big resource for somewhere like Merseyside,” she said. We could use some of those officers to help tackle some of these issues that we’re facing.”

Spurrell said there was a need to engage with young people “on the cusp of criminality” and the existing funding did not go far enough.

“We need more and it needs to be long term. There’s no quick wins with this kind of thing. It takes years,” she added.