Homicides and shootings have been rising in cities around the United States over the last year, but the "crime is up" narrative permeating hour cable news over the last few months does not tell the whole story. Murder and gun violence are among the most serious violent crimes, but they're also some of the rarest.
More standard crimes, including most property crimes and burglaries, are actually down or steady in many cities, according to Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist and Founders Professor at the University of Missouri—St. Criminologists like Rosenfeld predict homicide and gun violence will slowly return to pre rates. Rosenfeld's research was cited this week during President Joe Biden's meeting with police chiefs on the state of gun violence across the US.
That spike, which Rosenfeld said was the most significant rise in homicides that he's seen in a single year, began in the wake of George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis at the end of May While Rosenfeld observed a rise in homicides around the US in the first half of this year, he said it wasn't as sharp.
Christopher R. Herrmann noted that in the country's two largest police jurisdictions, New York City and Chicago, shootings and homicides have made up just 2. In an average year, one third of US cities sees a rise in homicides and shootings, while one third sees a drop, and another third will remain steady, Herrman said. Law-enforcement officers were social distancing and policing less directly.
One theory is that police who were busy patrolling some of the largest protests in American history were not patrolling other streets. Officers also may have pulled back from policing, either as a counterprotest or as an attempt to respond to political pressures. In an average year, guns account for roughly two-thirds of American homicides, but in , 77 percent of murders were shootings.
More Americans are carrying guns, both legally and illegally, than they have in the past. Firearms sales shot up last year, and so did police retrievals of illegal guns. That creates a vicious cycle: More people carrying guns tends to result in more shootings, which in turn heightens the desire to carry a weapon for protection.
When crime is decreasing, this dynamic helps it continue to fall, but once it begins to rise, the feedback loop turns ugly. Several analyses have found that murders have continued to rise this year, though not as sharply as last year. The FBI numbers could be wrong. Homicide statistics are very reliable because the crime produces a body or a missing person, but other categories are hazier because they rely on reports. In , reports of drug crimes dropped sharply , even as overdoses reached a record of more than 93,—suggesting that drug arrests, not use, had changed.
Experts who study violence point to multiple factors that might have played a role in the murder increase, from the emotional trauma and economic instability of the pandemic, which fell hardest on communities that were already struggling, to an increase in gun-carrying in public. Law enforcement agencies have reported increases in illegal firearm possession, and there have been anecdotal reports from cities across the country of more guns on the streets, Buggs said.
While handguns remained the most common murder weapon in the US, much about the surge in gun violence in remains unclear. More than 4, were attributed to arguments, at least to gang killings, and more than 1, were committed in the context of other crimes, including robberies and drug crimes.
But the number of murders also increased sharply across racial groups.
0コメント