It is terrible to have to get up every morning to see the new statistics and the journalistic stories that they generate. It is inconceivable and it has to stop as soon as possible, ”said Jim Kennedy, Mayor of Philadelphia, recently.
Kennedy was not referring to COVID-19, which continues to deliver disheartening news, but to violent crime, the silent pandemic that has been hitting the streets of the United States for at least two years.
Philadelphia, the sixth largest city in USA, with 1.6 million inhabitants, just closed 2021 with the worst homicide rate in its history: almost 600 murders, a figure that shattered the previous record of 500 deaths set in 1990.
The case of the city is not unique. In fact, another 11 of the most populous cities in the country just closed 2021 beating similar records. And five of them, exceeding the 2020 rates that had already been the highest to date.
According to FBI and police figures, Portland, Indianapolis, Toledo, Saint Paul Rochester, Tucson, Austin, Louisville, Columbus, Albuquerque and Baton Rouge top the list followed by New York, Chicago, Milwaukee and Minneapolis, which were close to their historical levels in terms of homicides and other crimes.
“It is extremely frustrating to see what is happening and the community has to react. This looks like a war zone, “said Frank Umbrino, the Rochester police chief, who has just recorded the worst crime cycle in three decades.
At the beginning of last year the Justice Department had already sounded the alarms about the worrying trend. According to their data, during the period between 2019 and 2020, the United States recorded the largest jump in its homicide rate since it began to collect this information in the 1960s. In that period, 21,500 people were murdered, 30 percent. increase compared to the previous cycle.
Although the official figures for 2021 are not yet available, the trend recorded by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit research group, suggests that the results will be even worse than the previous balance.
I knew that 2020 was going to be a bad year because of the covid. But I thought that in 2021 the numbers would improve, as these factors are no longer present. There are no more unemployment problems …
To put it in context, the statistics, if you look at the number of inhabitants, are not that dramatic. The 2020 murder rate was 6.5 per 100,000 inhabitants, still 40 percent below the highest level that was recorded at some points in the 1980s and 1990s, when it reached 10 homicides among the same number of people.
Still, the shootout is unusual compared to recent years.
Why the phenomenon is occurring is still the subject of intense debate among authorities and experts. And although not all agree, there are three explanations that stand out in the analysis of the majority.
The first is directly associated with the pandemic and on several fronts. According to Christopher Herrmann, professor of law and police science at the John Jay University for Criminal Justice in New York, COVID-19 brought with it a series of collateral effects that affected the mental health of the population. To the isolation to prevent contagions were added unemployment and food and housing insecurity that raised stress levels.
Likewise, many violence reduction programs and others that educate adolescents and young adults about the dangers of the “street” and how to avoid them were suspended. At the same time, many courts had to close and it was decided to reduce the prison population as a measure to limit overcrowding and contain the spread of the virus.
Herrmann, however, is surprised by the 2021 stats.
“I knew that 2020 was going to be a bad year because of the covid. But I thought that in 2021 the numbers would improve, as these factors are no longer present. There are no longer unemployment problems, cities have reopened, government subsidies have helped keep food and housing insecurity from being so latent, and court activity has resumed. What is happening is difficult to understand ”, says the analyst.
A situation that leads to the other two causes that are usually mentioned. Probably as an indirect consequence of the pandemic, arms sales in the country are also skyrocketing. According to Small Arms Analytics and Forcasting, a consulting firm that documents the firearms market in the United States, 2020 was the year in which the most guns were sold in the country (22.8 million) followed by 2021 , with 18 million. The previous record was 16.7 million set in 2016.
In the US, according to this same firm, there are already 393 million weapons in circulation among civilians. That is 46 percent of the entire arsenal in the world and implies that there is more than one for every inhabitant of the country.
According to Mark Olivia, of the Firearm Industry Trade Association, the uncertainty generated by the covid and the violent protests that broke out after the death of African-American George Floyd in 2020 could be behind this escalation in sales.
Which, according to Christian Heyne, from the Brady Campaign against Gun Violence, would also be behind the increase in murders that has been taking place.
“All of these things are interconnected. If uncertainty increases, if there is more access to firearms and the causes and motivators grow, it is almost logical that this leads to more violence ”, says Heyne.
Additionally, and this is the third factor, since the murder of George Floyd, two phenomena have been occurring that also contribute to the situation. According to a report by the Executive Forum for the police investigation, the retirement rate (retired) among uniformed personnel grew by 45 percent last year while 18 percent resigned from their positions.
Although the exact motives are unclear, it does coincide with calls for police reform that have been made in many states. The effect, in any case, is that there are fewer uniformed people patrolling the streets.
“We are working with the smallest police force in more than a decade. In a single year we lost 70 uniformed men. And that certainly affects our ability to protect the community, ”says Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, where there has been a 20 percent increase in murders between 2020 and 2021.
At the same time, many communities, fed up with cases of police brutality, have withdrawn from the public force and do not collaborate with it.
As Daniel Webster, director of the Center for Gun Policy at John Hopkins University, says, what has happened is a kind of perfect storm.
“Everything bad that could happen happened at the same time. Covid, economic crisis, the murder of George Floyd, the increase in the sale of weapons … it is not easy to pin down which of these things is associated with high crime rates. But what is clear is that there has been a simultaneous cascade of events that help explain it, “says Webster.
Authorities and experts continue to bet that things will return to tolerable levels once some of these factors disappear or are mitigated. But in a society as polarized as America today, that is not guaranteed.
SERGIO GÓMEZ MASERI
EL TIEMPO correspondent
Washington
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