The US saw significant crime rise across major cities in 2020. And it’s not letting up
Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
Sixty-three of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw increases in at least one category of violent crimes in 2020, which include homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, according to a report produced by the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Raleigh, North Carolina, did not report increases in any of the violent crime categories.
It’s nearly impossible to attribute any year-to-year change in violent crime statistics to any single factor, and homicides and shootings are an intensely local phenomenon that can spike for dozens of reasons. But the increase in homicide rates across the country is both historic and far-reaching, as were the pandemic and social movements that touched every part of society last year.
Experts point to a “perfect storm” of factors — economic collapse, social anxiety because of a pandemic, de-policing in major cities after protests that called for abolition of police departments, shifts in police resources from neighborhoods to downtown areas because of those protests, and the release of criminal defendants pretrial or before sentences were completed to reduce risk of Covid-19 spread in jails — all may have contributed to the spike in homicides.
In the wake of several protest movements following the killings of Black Americans by police — such as Gray in Baltimore or Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — there was a deliberate drawback of policing in some communities. Both Ferguson and Baltimore are case studies in examining the influence of de-policing on crime rates, as both cities experienced an increase in violence and a strained relationship between police and communities immediately following the killings.
The sectors of the criminal justice system that hold people accountable for their crimes have been severely impacted by Covid-19, experts say.
Jails, prisons and correctional facilities became hotspots for Covid-19 outbreaks among inmates and staff members, prompting some officials to aggressively reduce populations and suspend intake of new detainees.
Court systems that were notoriously overcrowded were forced to shut down, postpone or cancel proceedings altogether. State and local jury trials were severely limited in order to limit in-person interactions. Prosecutors also had to adapt in how they pursued cases.
None of this was directly the fault of COVID.
It was all the fault of terrible Progressive political responses to COVID.
The economic downturn was the fault of governments imposing useless lockdowns that started with the “15 days to slow the spread” and went on for over a year.
It was Progressive politicians who had the police stand down in the face of riots and progressive prosecutors who dropped or reduced charges against Antifa and organized rioters, sometimes en masse.
It was Progressive politicians and judges that turned COVID into a “get out of jail free card” and it Progressive prosecutors, politicians, and judges who created a bail reform policy that was also effectively “if you’re too poor for bail, just say so and we’ll let you out for free.”
It wasn’t COVID, it was Progressives responding to COVID and social unrest that did this.
CNN just can’t place the blame where it belongs, so they blame COVID like a nebulous miasma, instead of directly on the Progressives and the policies they enacted.
The Left undid four years of the Trump economy and twenty years of crime reduction.
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