Bad Policies, Not Covid, Caused Increased Crime

For over two years the American public has been told by the major media and a select group of criminal justice “experts” that the unprecedented increases  in crime and violence which began in 2020 and continues today were the result of “the disruptions of the pandemic—the social isolation, the closure of schools and jobs lost—likely led to an increase in crime,” as reported in the New York Times.  In a post last August, we addressed this claim pointing to multiple factors having nothing to do with the pandemic, particularly the widespread reduction of consequences for crime and policies that hogtied the police, which caused and continue to cause increased crime and violence.  In his piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, Joshua Crawford, of the Georgia Center for Opportunity, compares and contrasts crime in cities where “woke” policies remain in place with cities taking a pro-law enforcement approach.

Crawford notes that the analysts cited in the major media use crime rates in 2019 as a starting point for comparing crime in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Part of the problem with most media analysis is that 2019 didn’t represent a historical baseline of homicide and violent crime rates in America—2014 did. Nationally, violent crime and murder were much more prevalent in 2019 than in 2014. So though U.S. rates have fallen back to pre-pandemic levels, the country is well above normal violent-crime rates. Total violent crime in 2022 was 5% higher than in 2014, an increase that represents tens of thousands of additional victims in a single year. The national homicide rate in 2022 was 43% higher than in 2014. Since 2015, there have been roughly 30,000 more murders in the U.S. than there would have been if the homicide rate had stayed at the 2014 low.

None of this is easily attributable to Covid, nor are the vast local differences in violent crime and homicide rates that emerged in the past year and a half. Some cities have seen marked drops in crime. So far in 2023 homicides are down 17% in Atlanta, violent crime has fallen 12% in Dallas, and Miami’s murder and violent crime rates have hit historic lows. Elsewhere, things aren’t going nearly as well. In Washington, violent crime is up 40% in the first 10 months of 2023 compared with this time last year, and homicides are up 33%. Seattle has already had 10 more murders this year than in all of 2022. San Francisco’s murder rate also is on track to surpass last year’s

Pre- and post-pandemic comparisons obscure it, but there’s an obvious factor that explains the rate differences in these cities and the overall national increase: public safety policy. Officials in Washington, Seattle and San Francisco all have permissive attitudes toward criminals and hostile ones toward police. The current administration has been a leader in bad policy. Washington has twice significantly defunded the police in recent years, and in 2022 attempted to reduce penalties for carjackings even as auto-theft rates were skyrocketing. That change was so ill-advised that Congress overturned it this year.

By contrast, Atlanta, Dallas and Miami all treat crime as a serious problem. The Georgia government has led a robust anti-gang effort, while Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens pledged to hire an additional 250 police officers by the end of 2023. Dallas has used targeted policing in crime hot spots; Miami has remained dedicated to law enforcement.

Poorly conceived policy also explains the post-2014 and post-2019 increases in violent crime. Many of these detrimental policies, which really caught on in 2020, took shape after the Ferguson, Mo., riots in 2015.

Not surprisingly, some cities started dismantling the public safety guardrails years before the Ferguson riots.  California, for example had eliminated the consequences for drug use in 2000, and passed sweeping legislation reducing consequences for most crimes in 2011.  As in New York, DC and Illinois, by the time the pandemic hit and the George Floyd riots began, tens of thousands of criminals were already on the streets to take advantage of chaos and lockdowns.  In the high crime cities Mr. Crawford mentioned, the criminals are still on the streets.