An Acceptable Level of Violence
An Acceptable Level of Violence
FBI stats tout a 6.1% decrease in murders, but we are still up 35% from nine years ago. Describing crime levels as pre-pandemic is disingenuous.
In 1971, UK Home Secretary Reginald Maudling’s gaffe describing the current state of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, as ‘an acceptable level of violence’ has received five decades of well-deserved ridicule. National crime is not subject to the same periodic market fluctuations that create the ebb and flow in the stock market. The key factor in the crime puzzle has been the determination of society to choose to control crime through enforcement, prosecution, and corrections.
Murders are down but not significantly.
According to the FBI, there were 19,200 murders in 2022. They have two different figures for 2014, which experienced our most recent low. The first figure shows there were 14,249 murders, a difference of 4,951 from 2022. The second figure from their website is 14,164 which consists of a difference of 5,036. Either way, that’s a lot of extra murders. Over the years it really adds up.
For reference, the United States had 2,403 fatalities at Pearl Harbor and 2,996 on September 11, 2001.
Quit blaming the pandemic for crime!
The haughtiest claim has been that murders, the criminal act of killing a human being, have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Stating that crime and violence are benchmarked by the pandemic is unethical and disingenuous. The pandemic caused too many deaths, but few are violent crimes related to the virus. If we had a contagion that bred crime and violence, this might be relevant. In the early days of the pandemic quarantines, victim service professionals projected an increase in domestic violence and child abuse, neither of which materialized. Conflicts over one-way aisles in stores never amounted to any measurable increase in stranger violence. The rise in violent crime, especially murder, have nearly nothing to do with the SARS-COVID-19 virus and everything to do with an open season on cops and another single factor.
Crime has been rising, and for an obvious reason!
A lone factor has caused crime to rise during the pandemic period and police to stand down: The Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. The 2020 George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and Jacob Blake incidents initiated a national conversation among mayors and police chiefs on acceptable mediums of public protest. Then their cities burned.
The mayors of several cities including Washington D.C., New York City, Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon encouraged lawlessness to forment. Atlanta and Minneapolis permitted autonomous zones to be established by vandals and arsonists. In fact, neither policing nor crime, have trended toward pre-Michael Brown of Ferguson levels. Author and scholar Heather Mac Donald coined the term that defined our national slide in to increased violent crime rates: The Ferguson Effect.
Crime fighting technology has been beneficial
We are in an age of great innovation. Citizen cell phone cameras capture everything from code violations to murders in real time. GPS find my device programs solve property crimes every day. Consider the doorbell camera. It is almost ubiquitous in neighborhoods and generally accompanied by an array of other floodlights and cameras. Mobile fingerprint readers are in police cars. License plate readers positioned at traffic checkpoints are catching fugitives and locating stolen cars. More and more private cameras are providing feeds to real time crime centers. Facial recognition technology has become a promising starting point in investigations.
I wrote more about this in one of my early articles on the Substack platform.
What would our crime stats look like if we rolled back all the technological progress we have made since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007? I would imagine that it would be world with more fugitives at large, more stolen vehicles and more danger of violence for citizens. Our crime tally would be much worse, not better. In an honest assessment of our current crime statistics, we need to recognize that crime is seriously outpacing our technological capacity of game changers and force multipliers.
Keep technology but focus on the basics!
Many are returning from seeing all the high-speed displays at IACP in San Diego. Nothing on the convention floor will ever compare to a well-trained patrol officer skilled in the proper methods of developing reliable informants. Those officers are going to need cover from courageous lieutenants and captains, women and men who boldly stand up for those cops taking on high risk tasks for the benefit of the community. Now is the time to bet on and support professional policing!
Please keep all first responders in your prayers.
References
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/home
https://www.city-journal.org/article/an-update-on-americas-homicide-surge
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-crime-spike-fades
Violent crime had also decreased slightly in 2021, a big turnaround from 2020, when the murder rate in the U.S. jumped 29% during the pandemic that created huge social disruption and upended support systems.
<a href='https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murder-homicide-rate'>U.S. Murder/Homicide Rate 1990-2023</a>. www.macrotrends.net. Retrieved 2023-10-21.