Violent crime in the U.S. returns to the forefront of the political agenda

Often a bullet fired by an unstable man in Times Square on Saturday injured a four-year-old boy and his family while shopping for toys. It may also have changed the trajectory of the New York mayoral race, and changed the national debate about crime and policing.

Within an hour, Eric Adams, a retired police captain and mayoral candidate, used the scene as a backdrop for a press conference. candidate for law and order. Adams rejected calls from activists to “divert” police and instead ordered more authorities to be sent to the streets to cover up the furious gun violence.

It seems to work: in the first democratic election on Tuesday the most votes, concerns about crime and public safety began as a debate about how to revive a city plagued by coronavirus pandemics as the competition intensified.

The next day, in the White House, President Joseph Biden appeared to sing a similar tune. “Now is not the time to turn our backs on law enforcement,” Biden said, announcing measures to combat gun violence – helping communities hire more police, targeting illegal guns. In an attempt to launch a hopeful attack by Republicans, Biden said his administration was “taking bad actors who are doing bad things to our communities.”

Violent crime, which has been declining for a generation in America, has returned, and once again on the political agenda, after numerous shootings and murders.

Homicides rose by 18 per cent compared to 2020 at this point – the number of homicides also rose in the year – according to a sample New Orleans crime analyst and expert Jeff Asher from 72 cities expects it to get worse this summer.

In New York, shootings rose 53% through June 20, and more than 100 percent in the past two years. The 1,402 shootings in Chicago over the same period were up 58 percent from 2019. In Atlanta, the rise in violence has given a new impetus to give the residents of the affluent Buckhead neighborhood a boost to separate themselves from the big city so that they can form their own. police department.

Republicans are taking issue with the issue, denouncing legitimacy in “democratic cities” and accusing progressive demands for “defusing” the police. This week the party accused Biden and other Democrats of doing “everything in their power to enforce the law.”

But violence is widespread and not limited to areas subject to democratic control. The database maintained by the Gun Violence Archive counted 26 mass shootings since June 15 – from places like Newark, New Jersey and Washington, DC to Aurora, Colorado, Anchorage, Alaska and Albertville, Alabama.

“This particular phenomenon is happening in every city in the country – big, medium, small, Democrat, Republican, red, blue – it doesn’t matter,” said Mike Justicelor, a professor of criminal justice at the University. He was also a Democrat member of the House of Representatives in New Haven Connecticut. “Every shot is everywhere.”

Most criminal justice experts believe the pandemic has played a role, exacerbating economic deprivation, closing down courts or blocking crowded neighborhoods with few resources to divert.

William Bratton, who heads the New York and Los Angeles police departments, believes some of the criminal justice reforms aimed at reducing prison populations have been exaggerated. Among them: the move to end the cash bond, except for misdemeanors, in New York.

The most politically charged suggestions for the rise in homicides highlight protests against police in the summer as a result of the assassination of George Floyd or as a result of police action being pushed back. The data belies simple explanations, according to Asher.

The killings have occurred in cities of all sizes, not just in places where protests have erupted, and he said: “If you do the math where the most protests have been or have been the most violent protests and the increase in murder rates, there is no relationship.”

While shootings and murders have risen, other crimes, such as robberies, have continued to decline over the past year. This has led Lawlor to a more nuanced theory.

Shootouts, he warns, tend to pile up among law enforcement people and often arise as a result of gang pay cycles. Police have become skilled in recent years in identifying potential perpetrators and then intervening in trained community leaders.

These pre-emptive gatherings to gather intelligence and build relationships have not been possible during the pandemic – let alone after Floyd killed police last year after damaging minority communities and law enforcement relations.

“If the community doesn’t trust the police – and the police refuse a community – that’s broken,” Lawlor said. Meanwhile, officials have left demoralized departments in large numbers.

For the Democratic Party’s moderate establishment, growing violence poses a challenge to “divert” – and even abandon – the police by avoiding the aggressive impulses of the 1994 crime bill signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Biden regretted a large part of his last presidential campaign with black voters for his support for mandatory sentences, “three-strike” rules and racial debate over “super predators” on city streets. Many Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, a former House spokesman, also feel it now.

While Biden ordered more police this week, he also offered a grant for job training programs. Not everyone was surprised. Kofi Ademola, a consultant for Chicago’s Good Kids Mad City Chicago anti-violence group, said the violence is “good” concentrated in poorer neighborhoods, but when it goes to affluent areas, “then it becomes an emergency”.

“If you look at Biden’s plan, you’ll see more dollars in the police than so-called summer jobs or evidence-based jobs,” he added.

The group does not want more police, instead of asking for a city ordinance that would spend about 2 percent of the police budget, about $ 35 million, and programs to stop youth employment, counseling and mediation and violence.

Christopher Hayes, a professor of urban studies at Rutgers University, was concerned that the most effective policies to reduce violence might not be the easiest to sell to voters.

“It’s politically appropriate to look at that and say, ‘Things are out of control. We have to get to that with a hammer,'” Hayes said. “What’s not comfortable is that a lot of people related to this are poor.”

Assuming he will become the next mayor of New York — the final count is expected in a few weeks — the black Adams may be the best case scenario to test the Democrats ’ability to create side effects without treating criminals. He has been promising voters for months that he has unique experience in targeting violent outbreaks and taking guns out of the street while at the same time reforming the department and resolving community relations.

As Adams said in a recent interview, “I support the closure of the Rikers (Island Prison), but I also support the closure of the pipeline that feeds the Rikers.”

Soon New Yorkers and the nation will see that this is possible.

Additional report by James Politi in Washington and Claire Bushey in Chicago