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A little over a month ago, not very far from where I live, a small group of Brooklyn residents were enjoying a late-night cookout near a local playground when two gunmen dressed in black approached the group and fired shots, killing a 1-year-old child in his stroller. The child, Davell Gardner Jr., was another tragic victim of a wave of gun violence that swept New York City in June and July.
And not just New York. Murders have spiked this summer in large cities across the country, even as other violent crimes have decreased. What’s behind the rise, and how should cities respond when trust in law enforcement has sunk to record lows? Here’s what people are saying.
Why have shootings increased?
Fluctuations in crime rates are notoriously difficult to explain. In fact, criminologists still don’t agree on what caused the major decline in crime in the United States over the past three decades, which makes accounting for this most recent spike especially difficult. Still, a few potential theories have emerged.
The pandemic-induced recession
Murder rates typically increase in the summer, but experts told The Times that the coronavirus has compounded the socioeconomic stressors that often give rise to gun violence, including poverty, unemployment, housing instability and hunger.
In Kansas City, for example, my colleagues have reported that many recent shootings have seemingly had no clear rationale, often arising from petty arguments that devolve into violence. In many cases, economic hardship appeared to play a role. “The pandemic has exacerbated the root causes of gun violence,” Michael Sean Spence, policy and implementation director at the nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety, told The Times. “What we’re seeing is almost a perfect storm.”
The national reckoning over police brutality
The killings by police officers of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that sparked protests around the country may also have contributed to a climate of despair and desperation. In Kansas City, the Rev. Darren Faulkner, who runs a program that provides social support to those deemed most at risk of violence, said that such cases had left many of his clients feeling “hopelessly trapped in a system in which they will never thrive.”
Some elected officials have suggested that law enforcement agencies may be partly to blame for the rise in crime. In New York, gun arrests started to plummet in mid-May even as shootings began to surge, raising concerns that officers were staging a work slowdown as a form of retaliation against the protests.
But police officials have denied the accusations; rather, they say, the decline in gun arrests resulted from a need to divert personnel and resources to the protests, which has prevented them from stamping out feuds between street gangs that they say are responsible for most of the recent killings.
(The New York police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, has also attributed the rise in shootings to recent criminal justice reforms, including the release of thousands of people from Rikers Island under a new bail law and efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus in the city’s jails. But data obtained by The Times suggests that neither measure has played a significant role in the uptick, which after all is not a New York-specific phenomenon.)
This would not be the first time that high-profile killings by officers coincided with a spike in murder rates, which rose nationally in the wake of the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Some observers called this phenomenon the “Ferguson effect,” positing that the protests against police brutality had made officers more afraid or unwilling to do their jobs.
But the Ferguson effect is a much-disputed idea. Some crime experts have turned the theory on its head, claiming that high-profile killings by the police make people, especially people of color, more loath to call the police in the first place. “When trust in police falls, more people decide they don’t want to have anything to do with the police,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, told HuffPost. “That means that when disputes arise, they’re more likely to take matters into their own hands.”
More guns in circulation
In The Washington Post, Christopher Ingraham offers another simple explanation for the rise in gun violence: Americans are buying an extraordinary number of guns. Firearm sales between March and June exceeded predictions by some three million guns, and in June reached the highest levels on record since data collection began in 1998, according to a Brookings study. And where there are more guns, there are more shootings.
The Brookings study found this most recent spike in firearm sales was different from previous ones in another crucial respect: Gun purchases have been higher in states with greater levels of racial animus. “Taken together, the findings paint a particularly bleak picture of the United States in 2020,” Mr. Ingraham writes. “Reeling from a pandemic, an economic downturn and a national reckoning with racism and police brutality, many Americans are choosing to arm themselves in the hope, perhaps, of protecting themselves in the event that circumstances get worse.”
A trend or a blip?
Despite this most recent increase in shootings, national crime rates are still at or near the lowest levels they’ve been in a generation. As German Lopez notes in Vox, even the cities experiencing spikes are still safer than they were just a few years ago. In New York, for example, murder numbers were up as of June from last year, but were comparable to those the city had in 2015. The key question, then, is whether the surge is an isolated event or the beginning of a longer-term trend.
As it happens, data from the New York Police Department may provide a tentative answer: Shootings in the city appeared to peak in late July, and have now declined to around pre-pandemic levels. John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, tweeted:
Moving forward, though, no one can be sure about what will happen. “This is such a weird year in so many dimensions, and it’s going to take us a while to figure out what caused any of these differences in crime,” Jennifer Doleac, an associate professor of economics and director of the Justice Tech Lab at Texas A&M, told The Times. “It is perfectly reasonable to think the first half of this year may not tell us what the rest of the year will look like.”
What can be done to stop more shootings from happening?
Because the causes of the shooting spike are up for debate, the solutions are equally so. Still, in a report for the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan research organization, Dr. Rosenfeld and Ernesto Lopez argue that there are some evidence-based measures that could help stem the tide. Concentrating law enforcement in “hot spots” of criminal activity, for example, is associated with modest reductions in crime.
But not everyone thinks that more policing is the answer. In The New Yorker, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor notes that the city of Chicago has nearly tripled its per capita police spending over the past 56 years, but Black residents are no safer, and its failures to curb community and police violence through conventional law enforcement have produced a crisis of mental health, particularly among Black residents. A task force report commissioned by the mayor in 2016 concluded that the Chicago Police Department’s own data “gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.”
During the pandemic, many cities have maintained or even tried to increase their police budgets while making cuts to public services meant to mitigate poverty and promote social mobility, which in turn fuels calls for more policing. It would be better, Dr. Taylor argues, to reroute funding from the police to address the underlying causes of crime. Calls for such reinvestment proposals have grown louder in the wake of the George Floyd protests while also dividing local Black and Latino lawmakers, including Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago.
Anna Harvey, the director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University, notes on Twitter that there are many ways to reduce violent crime that don’t involve law enforcement, such as providing short-term financial assistance and therapy, expanding health insurance to enable access to substance abuse treatment, and giving summer jobs to young people. In some cities, such as Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., organizations like Cure Violence Global are employing community-based “violence interrupters” to defuse conflict without involving the police.
Dr. Rosenfeld and Mr. Lopez, for their part, maintain that police will still be needed to fight crime, but agree that community-based approaches are also necessary. And to the extent that more policing is part of the solution, they say, it must be accompanied by reforms that restore community trust and prevent further violence.
Last, but certainly not least, ending the pandemic would also help. “The police, public health, and community approaches to violence reduction require that people meet face-to-face,” Rosenfeld and Lopez write. “They cannot be replaced by Zoom.”
Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
MORE ON THE SUMMER SHOOTING SURGE
“After a mass shooting at a block party, community leaders are left reeling, seething and pleading” [The Washington Post]
“Many Americans Are Convinced Crime Is Rising In The U.S. They’re Wrong.” [FiveThirtyEight]
“Chicago’s Rise in Shootings” [The New York Times]
WHAT YOU’RE SAYING
Here’s what readers had to say about the last debate: What does the Democratic Party stand for?
Deb from Oregon: “Congressional progressive members can win liberal districts but a president has to represent all of us. Seniors tend to vote more consistently than most groups and most of those that lean Democrat are center-left like Biden. Many of the platforms of the left of the party are wished for by voters but a huge ship like the United States takes a long time to turn safely.”
Randall from Texas: “Trump’s drive toward authoritarian rule has been tempered by his own laziness and incompetence. If, as Biden promised his wealthy donors, ‘nothing will fundamentally change’ in a Biden administration, we will open ourselves to the election of another right-wing populist authoritarian in 2024, and the next one is unlikely to be as lazy or incompetent. If centrist Democrats think President Trump is bad, just wait until they get a look at President Tom Cotton or President Josh Hawley.”
David from Indiana: “Much is unclear about the future of the Democratic Party and a Biden administration — perhaps nowhere more than on arms control and foreign policy. Kamala Harris voted against an amendment that Bernie Sanders proposed this summer to cut the $740 billion military budget by 10 percent. Will Biden stop the new generation of ‘usable’ nuclear weapons that are designed for ‘limited’ nuclear war? As a group of former senior officials wrote to Congress, ‘limited’ nuclear war is a fantasy; the reality would be uncontrollable escalation.”
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What’s Behind the Recent Rise in Shootings? - The New York Times
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