As the Police Are Scorned and “Progressive” Prosecutors Settle In, Murder Explodes Across America

The New York Times today makes some efforts to explain away the story, but for the most part tells it straight up:  Murder is surging in cities across the country:

Overall crime is down 5.3 percent in 25 large American cities relative to the same period in 2019, with violent crime down 2 percent.

But murder in these 25 cities is up 16.1 percent in relation to last year. It’s not just a handful of cities driving this change, either. Property crime is down in 18 of the 25 sampled cities, and violent crime is down in 11 of them, but murder is up in 20 of the cities.

The story continues:

Homicides usually rise in the summer, which coincided this year with many people emerging from pandemic lockdown. In one recent weekend in Chicago, 14 people were killed and at least 106 people were shot, the most in eight years. And as The New York Times reported recently: “It has been nearly a quarter century since New York City experienced as much gun violence in the month of June as it has seen this year.” (On Sunday night, the city reportedly had nine killings in the previous 24 hours.)

You can already see how the rationalizing starts:  Murder rises in the summer anyway.  And that’s true, but didn’t we also have a summer in 2019?  Beyond that, as the Times quietly notes in the preceding paragraph, the Uniform Crime Reports, upon which its story is based, go “at least through the end of May.”  But summer doesn’t start in May.  It starts in June.  And the hottest months of summer are July and August, which the Times’ figures obviously do not include.  So no, it’s not the weather.

The report continues farther down the page:

An additional 11 cities provide year-to-date murder data. Murder is up 21.8 percent in all 36 cities with 2020 data through at least May, with 29 of those cities seeing an increase this year relative to last year.

So here’s the story.  In the 36 largest cities in the country, murder is up over 20% in the first half of 2020 over the same period last year.  If this were a speech by Bill Barr about the right of religious people to assemble in church even during the COVID outbreak, we would hear that what’s facing us is a “crisis.”  Where is the sense of alarm when murder  —  which disproportionately afflicts African Americans  —  is going through the roof?

Still, if we can’t blame the weather, maybe it’s the fabled loss of trust in the police:  “Some research suggests that a loss of trust in law enforcement can cause citizens to be reluctant to contact the police, and people may be more likely to take justice into their own hands to resolve disputes.”  To which the only sensible response is, how dumb do they think we are?  Are we supposed to believe that people who would otherwise seek help from the police to resolve their disagreements now decide that murder is the next best option?  Where is the evidence for that?  For that matter, where is the evidence that the citizenry  —  as opposed to the chattering classes in academia and the press  —  no longer trust the police?  As I’ve noted before, citizens most likely to become murder victims want more policing, not less.

There are, however, two things notably absent from the article’s efforts to explain the surge in murder:  The massive increase over the last several months of unhinged condemnation of law enforcement and attempts (through abolition, de-funding or “reform”) to weaken policing; and the ascendancy, in the very same large cities now at the center of the murder spree, of “progressive” prosecutors who think that police are the problem and going easier on criminals is the solution.