by Marin Cogan
It’s not every day that you see officials touting criminal trends in early summer. Summer is the time when violent crime surges and no one needs to celebrate a win before halftime.
This has been different.
In June, the FBI released initial quarterly data for the period from January to March 2024, showing that violent crime rates continue to decline from the peaks of the pandemic. In the first few months of this year, data suggests that violent crime has declined for 15 consecutive years. with cents, and murders by more than 26 percent, until the same period in 2023.
“Violent crime is falling to record levels in the United States,” President Joe Biden said, while touting the FBI’s estimates. “Americans are safer today than they were when I took office. “
It is worth approaching initial knowledge of the crime with caution, especially at this early stage. But the FBI report broadly coincides with last year’s, when the government recorded a 13% reduction in murders, likely “one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded. “”, according to crime statistics analyst Jeff Asher.
The Biden administration, despite what Donald Trump says, has prioritized crime reduction. The government has sent billions of dollars to cities and states as a component of the American Rescue Plan and has suggested that they spend it on fighting and preventing crime, adding more hiring. police officers. He also championed the two-component Safer Communities Act, which created genuine investments in online violence intervention and paved the way for the most significant expansion of background checks in decades.
Whether the electorate will give him credit for this is another question. Decades of polls show that Americans have a tendency for crime to be rising, even if it isn’t.
But there may be another explanation for why Americans are slow to see the good news: They’re still reeling from the genuinely disturbing rise in homicides in 2020. The homicide rate didn’t reach the highs of the 1970s until the early 1970s. month of the 1990s, but the fact that it has increased by more than 30% in 2020 is a real cause for concern.
Now that violent crime has decreased, it’s worth remembering what happened. Is the rise in murders in the U. S. part of a broader trend or is it something more abnormal?
A few years into the pandemic, it turns out that the increase in homicides in the United States has been unique. According to several studies and a systematic review of crime knowledge for 2020, in most countries crime fell as a result of Covid-19 lockdowns and then gradually returned to pre-pandemic levels once lockdown measures were lifted. Homicide is the exception to the rule, but not like in the United States.
Homicides around the world, according to the 46 studies reviewed by the authors, have increased especially due to the pandemic. “Most studies reported no relationship between Covid-19 and homicides,” the study authors write. Dates between the implementation or relaxation of the blockade measures and the murders.
The Small Arms Survey, which collects and analyzes knowledge about guns and violence around the world, also found that the global rate of violent deaths declined globally in 2020.
What else in the United States?
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“No other country has noticed such a sudden increase in gun violence,” says Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton University who studies the intersections of urban segregation, economic inequality, and violence. It is exactly gun violence that has caused violent crime to skyrocket. . Americans bought guns in record numbers during the pandemic, and according to research by Rob Arthur and Asher for Vox, there’s evidence that more people were using guns in 2020, even before crime skyrocketed that summer. “Guns don’t necessarily create violence in and of themselves, but they make violence more deadly,” Sharkey says.
While experts caution that it’s difficult to determine with certainty what caused the rise in violent crime, it’s likely that a few other points contributed to it.
One of them, the police murder of George Floyd and the riots surrounding it, were accompanied by an upcoming police withdrawal. Previous studies have shown that high-profile incidents of police violence correspond to a withdrawal of the police and an increase in crime, specifically robberies. and homicides. Data that followed the riots that followed Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and elsewhere shows a marked decline in police activity and arrests that summer.
“There’s been a basic shift in our understanding of policing in the United States,” Sharkey says. Millions of people took to the streets to call for an end to police brutality; Long-standing cultural assumptions about the authority and legitimacy of the police to ensure public protection through any means have been questioned. “This understanding of who is in the public area has collapsed considerably,” he says. “What we do know is that when other people withdraw from public spaces and take refuge in their homes, it creates a vacuum in which public spaces can generate a risk of violence. “
Violent crime is now down in the United States, with several cities seeing sharp declines in homicides and violent crime.
This could be partly because the most disruptive phase of the pandemic has passed, but Sharkey believes federal investment in cities to ensure public protection has made a real difference. “I think federal investment is probably the most productive explanation for why the increase in violence has not persisted and why it has slowed so substantially in recent years. This is probably something that is not getting the popularity it deserves. “
However, some of the points that drive this accumulation (the preponderance of so many firearms and typical incidents of fatal police violence) persist. And for this reason, experts believe that the violence of this era does not deserve to be considered a unique event. , however, deserve to be studied to see how violence can be prevented in the future. While crime continues to decline, some of the situations that have contributed to the rise in violent crime remain.
This story was originally published in Today, Explicado, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Register here for the next editions.
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