What we're seeing is a very specific dramatic increase
in murder and gun violence.
There was about a 30% increase nationally in
murder from 2019 to 2020.
Year on year, it was by far the largest increase ever
recorded. We have data going back to the 1960s in
terms of national murder trends.
The largest previous increase was 12, 12 and a
half percent year on year.
So a 30% increase was really dramatic.
Gun violence has been consistent. And as American
as an apple pie.
Unfortunately, the rise in violence has occurred just
about everywhere in the United States without much
difference regionally.
But the rise in gun violence impacts the population on
equally.
The risk of homicide is much, much, much higher.
If you're black, then if you are any other race or
ethnicity.
In the United States, black people are over 12 times
more likely to be a victim of gun homicide than white
people.
Everything is pretty much set up and designed for some
African American youth to fail.
It feels like it's an attack on black men.
You know what I mean? It feels like, to be honest,
like the world hates me.
When I was 15, I knew I was going to die at 18 and I
accepted it.
Trauma is ubiquitous in this area.
The victims of violence are traumatized.
The perpetrators are traumatized.
The law enforcement and other officials who are
working with these populations are traumatized.
So having a trauma informed approach to these issues is
really important.
Here's why murder rates are rising in the US and what we
can do about it. If you were to look at the overall
crime data since the start of the pandemic, it doesn't
look like there's much of a.
Problem when we talk about crime going up or down for
the most part. In most places, crime is falling
because people aren't out and about.
You can't shoplift if stores have been closed in
2020 and 2021.
But when you separate out the data on murder, it
becomes clearer that something has changed in the
past few years.
A lot of these sort of crimes of randomness, crimes
of mobility, which makes up that big capital C crime
number, those are down thanks to the pandemic.
There are four major categories when talking
about violent crime, homicide, rape, robbery and
aggravated assault.
Violent crime as a category rose about 5% between 2019
and 2020. Homicide, which is more colloquially
referred to as murder, rose nearly 30%.
It's gun violence and murder, which make up this
tiny slice of overall major crime.
That is really what we're seeing, this sort of
sustained increase.
Nearly 80% of murders in 2020 were committed with a
firearm.
The rest of crime, which is generally more dependent on
mobility, dependent on more random criminal acts, those
haven't really increased.
It's very hard to know with certainty what drives crime
trends, but I think there's broad agreement that there
are at least three factors that are playing an
important role. The first, of course, is the pandemic
itself, which placed the individuals who are at the
highest risk of violence under enormous pressure, and
they were already under pressure to begin with.
And at the same time, it put the institutions that
are responsible for engaging those individuals,
law enforcement courts and community based workers all
under tremendous strain as well.
Investments in civic infrastructure reduce
violent crime, for example, providing structured
opportunities for kids and for adolescents, whether
that's afterschool programs or summer jobs programs,
it's lengthening the school day.
All of these interventions reduce the risk of violent
crime because we're giving teenagers and adolescents
some place to go that structured and safe.
And during the pandemic, of course, that all fell apart.
The second factor is the social unrest that followed
the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
There was a significant surge in violent crime
immediately after the murder of George Floyd.
As people lose trust in the criminal justice system
after these widespread instances of police
shootings and are less likely to participate in it
plausibly, which leads to these very difficult to
interrupt cycles of violence.
Highly publicized incidents of police violence really
drive a significant wedge between police and the
communities that they're supposed to serve when they
are disconnected.
Crime Surges.
The George Floyd shooting to black people was the last
straw. You see this black man suffering like with a
knee in his neck, begging, I cannot breathe, sir.
You will be angry because at the end of the day,
George Floyd looked like one of my uncles when that
happened. We just felt like, So y'all are really
just going to kill us.
There was a time when people were scared to commit a
crime in front of the police.
Right now, a lot of people just can care less.
The cops are scared when brothers that's committing
these crimes are noticing that the cops are scared.
Why do you think the crime rates are so high?
We already angry.
You're not going to protect us, but what are we going to
do?
Tio Hardiman is the executive director of the
nonprofit organization Violence Interrupters, which
helps facilitate gang mediation and works with
high risk young men and gang members.
Violence Interrupters. What you might say is a public
health approach to reducing shootings and homicides here
in Chicago and across the nation, we look at violence
as an epidemic.
It's learned behavior, and we have to train people and
educate them on how to unlearn violent behavior.
I got shot in my head because of choices that I
made in my past.
Around that time, I had just stopped gangbanging,
just stopped selling drugs, you know, carrying guns.
I had just stopped.
I remember at that time I was trying to stop drinking.
And I remember that night I slipped up.
I went to the party, I got drunk. And I remember
telling myself right before I got shot, I have tomorrow,
man. They shot the cop 28 times.
They hit me and my friend in our heads.
I was bleeding out my head like a faucet, but I
survived. I've been doing different things to heal
from that. You know, giving back and trying to talk to
people who's going through without going through is
helped a lot.
The third factor playing a significant role is guns,
specifically firearms.
And what we know is that there is a massive surge in
legal purchases of guns.
During the pandemic.
There were an estimated 21 million guns sold in the US
in 2020, breaking the previous record in 2016 of
just over 16 million sold in 2021.
That number drops slightly to a little less than 19
million guns sold.
What we also know is that a larger share of those
legally purchased guns were diverted into the hands of
criminals more quickly than normal.
Criminologists call this the time to crime and the
time to crime for most weapons, meaning the time a
legally purchased gun eventually finds its way to
a crime scene is often two, three, four years.
Unfortunately, the number of guns that found their way
to a crime scene newly purchased guns within six
months, surged massively during the pandemic.
We know for a fact that poverty, we know for a fact
that discrimination has played a very significant
role in an adverse way when it comes down to poor
communities, especially black and brown communities,
but in particular the African American community.
When we think about what drives a particular
individual to commit a particular crime at a
particular time, we tend to think about motive and
opportunity and probability of getting caught to motive
oftentimes comes down to an economic motive, engaging in
an illegal activity to get some kind of asset versus
legal activity.
When you are born into poverty or when you are
faced with poverty and it's like you see, you cannot get
the resources that you need. You give up and you
start doing other things.
We need help.
We need resources.
We need mental health services.
We need jobs.
We need help.
Many headlines have focused on the rise in gun violence
in major cities, but only focusing on cities doesn't
tell us the whole story.
New York City is the biggest city in the country.
Chicago has the most number of murders every year.
So that's sort of, I think, why people fixate that.
Also, the increase was not just a urban city problem.
It wasn't a blue problem.
It wasn't a red problem.
Murder increased in big cities.
It increased in small cities. It increased in the
suburbs. It increased in rural counties.
The way the US gathers crime data can make it difficult
to determine exactly where crime is rising.
Local police departments voluntarily report crime
statistics to the FBI.
The FBI then releases that data, but it's delayed.
If you want 2021, 2022 crime data, you have to go do it
by hand, literally.
And there's a lot of cities and a lot of villages and a
lot of towns and a lot of counties in the United
States. So we're not getting a comprehensive
collection of data, even if we go straight to the
source.
Our collection of data from about 100 big cities with
available data showed murder up about 6% last year
relative to 2020, which we know big cities tend to
overstate national trends.
The cities that saw the biggest increase in crime
between 2020 and 2021 are spread out across the map.
Most have populations under 1 million people and a mix
of political affiliations for city leadership.
Often this gun violence is concentrated in poor
communities of color in cities all across the
country. However, it's actually much more
concentrated than that.
What we find is that crime doesn't just concentrate
among a certain group of people or in a certain
neighborhood. It actually concentrates in micro
locations known as hotspots and 4 to 5% of the cities
geography. These hotspots can make up 60 to 70% of all
violent crime.
In Chicago, a lot of the violence congregates around
specific neighborhoods.
You just have to know where you're at.
You have to know who's around you.
People prey on the weak here.
When you are so impoverished that you have
nothing, you start looking for the easiest way to get
something. And it's sad that people got to live like
that. You know, it's sad.
But this is the reality of our city.
A fraction of a percent of the city's population can
account for the significant majority of gun violence
incidents. And so one of the important things for
policymakers to know is you don't have to be everywhere
and work with everyone to make a difference.
What we do as a public health approach, we gather
all the data. We take a look at the times when most
of the shootings and homicides occur.
We call it a timeline.
We map the area.
We look at the hotspot areas where most of the
incidents take place.
Tio is really helping me understand the power that I
have to speak.
I work with a nonprofit called Fierce Women and face
the point of violence interrupters and fierce
women of faith is to get people out here that
understand us so we can bring them to us, so we can
show them there's resources, there is help.
There's people that love you because Chicagoans feel
like there's no hope.
We call it constructive shadowing, where we shadow
the individuals that help them along the way.
So it's like a handholding approach in the beginning.
And then once the person becomes a productive member
of society and begins to think on a higher level,
then we turn them over to the overall society and they
should be okay.
Preliminary big city data from the first half of 2022
suggests that the murder rate may be declining year
to date.
So that's a big debate in the conversation about
violent crime, whether you should focus on root causes
or whether you should focus on proximate causes.
And the vast majority of the evidence says that if
you want to address violent crime, the best way to do it
is to do it directly by identifying where it
concentrates and among whom it concentrates and then
engaging those places and people.
There are some fairly simple things that we can do to
deter violent crime.
We know, for instance, just putting up surveillance
cameras deters violent crime.
Having bright lighting makes a difference to
violent crime, if an area is lit up at night.
Even if somebody is living on the margin and they want
something or they need something and they want to
get it then and they have a gun, they see an
opportunity, if the probability of detection is
increased, they won't take that action.
President Biden has urged cities to spend COVID relief
money on police and crime prevention measures.
The answer is not to defund the police.
The answer is to fund the police.
The calls to defund the police didn't actually
result in that many places defunding the police.
And in fact, in most departments, if you look at
the budget data, police budgets have increased
because cities are trying to address rising violent
crime. We are seeing police departments make allocation
decisions with the officers that they do have that are
not always the optimal choices in order to address
rising violent crimes.
The NYPD has announced that they're investing in a
strategy of making these misdemeanor quality-of-life
arrests, and that's just, frankly, a misallocation of
resources.
A spokesperson for the NYPD told CNBC, "Over the last
eight years, the NYPD has been forging fundamental
changes in policing, including building strong
relationships through neighborhood policing and by
focusing resources on the drivers of violence through
precision policing.
The NYPD responds to and addresses crime complaints
from the very communities it serves and we focus on
areas where the highest concentration of crime
exists.
I think, unfortunately, the general public is generally
being presented with a series of binary choices.
Either you care about cops or you care about
communities. Either you're for crime reduction or
you're for social justice.
And I think these are all false choices.
I always try to resist anybody making the argument
that public safety is a Republican issue or it's a
Democratic issue. We should all be on the side of doing
the things that reduce violent crime victimization.
And those things include traditional Democratic
policy proposals like investing in health and
education and economic opportunity and they include
traditional Republican policy proposals like
supporting police departments and increasing
police resources that are directed towards preventing
and deterring violent crimes.
Public safety is a team sport, and so we need the
members of the team to work together.