Crime Epidemic In New York & LA

Four shooting deaths In Los Angeles over the past weekend marked a milestone in La La land.  As Kevin Rector & Nicole Santa Cruz report in the Los Angeles Times,  for the first time in eleven years there have been 300 murders in the city, and the year is not over yet.  The victims last weekend included a 17-year-old boy, two men aged 50 and 20, and a 41-year-old woman.   A crime analyst from New Orleans told the Times that homicides are spiking in several big cities, which he suggests discounts a local cause for the increase in LA.  He does note that a “loss of police legitimacy” might have had an impact.  Meanwhile in New York City Mayor de Blasio is “real concerned” about the rising crime in the subway, including a surge of commuters being pushed onto the tracks.

Stephanie Pagones of Fox News reports that between last Wednesday and Sunday two men and a woman waiting for trains were pushed onto the tracks.  The NYPD also reported that 25 people were shot over the weekend, eight fatally.  On Sunday, a young woman was killed and six others were wounded by gunmen at a party in a Brooklyn apartment building.   According to police Shootings have doubled this year in New York City over last year, with at least 1,660 incidents, and murders have risen by about 37 percent, to about 400.

While pro-defendant groups are quick to respond that shootings and homicides were much higher in the 1980s, the reason that these crimes declined by the late 1990s and continued to drop through 2015 has everything to do with crime policy.  Beginning in the mid-1980s Federal and state governments got tougher on criminals, particularly repeat felons.  By the 1990s policing which targeted high crime districts, mandatory minimum sentences, and progressive sentence increases for habitual felons drove crime rates down everywhere in the country.   Places that implemented the toughest policies enjoyed the most dramatic downturns.  New York and California were at the forefront of these changes and they benefited the most from them.

During the Obama administration, the federal government and many of the larger states began to abandon the policies that had made most of the country much safer.  It was called sentencing reform.  The President, his Attorney General, progressive politicians, established pro-defendant groups along with some new groups such as Black Lives Matter, with the enthusiastic support of the mainstream media, admonished America for the disparate impact that these “tough on crime” policies had on minorities, particularly African Americans.  Liberal states responded by enacting sweeping sentencing reforms which targeted so-called non-violent property and drug offenders for government-funded rehabilitation programs rather than incarceration.

Thousands of felons gained early release in California under Jerry Brown’s reforms, and similar reforms were also enacted to release offenders in New York.  In both states, these new policies kept criminals on the streets by reducing the consequences for re-offending.  President Obama released thousands of drug dealers from federal prison, and his Justice Department placed consent decrees on many big city police departments tying the hands of officers to supposedly curb racist policing.

At about the same time protests over claimed systemic racism by police began to follow the highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, mostly by police.  The deaths of Travon Martin, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown made international headlines and sparked protests, and in the cases of Brown and Gray, rioting.  Later investigations by the Obama Justice Department, which could not find a racist motive for these deaths, were mostly ignored.  By the time the video of habitual criminal George Floyd dying under the knee of a renegade white police officer flashed across television, all the ingredients were in place for a national explosion of violent crime.  The well-orchestrated protests which devolved into riots in cities across the country, the thousands of criminals on the streets due to sentencing reforms, and the relentless intimidation of police by the press, politicians and activist groups have created the perfect storm.

If anything, the pandemic has reduced assaults and the loss of life, because in the high crime cities of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, Baltimore and Washington DC,  many businesses remain shuttered and most people rarely leave their homes.   But as vaccines become available, businesses reopen and the public begin to leave their homes, the crime numbers are likely to increase.