Through the long lens of history, violent crime is a fraction of what it was in the early 1990s. But homicides have surged from historic lows over the past several years in many California cities — and across the nation — and no one’s sure if it’s a pandemic-inspired spike, or if it’s here to stay.
The city of San Bernardino recorded the highest per-capita murder rate among California’s larger cities in 2020 — 30.6 murders for every 100,000 residents, according to federal data collated by Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that supports education and research about firearms in America.
In similarly sized Moreno Valley, there were just 7 murders per 100,000 residents.
Homicides more than doubled in some Southern California cities from 2016 to 2020, including Riverside (10 to 24), Anaheim (7 to 16), Hemet (5 to 14), Pasadena (2 to 7) and Torrance and Glendale (1 to 3 in both).
Meanwhile, murders in the city of Los Angeles climbed from 293 in 2016 to 352 last year; while Oakland saw murders jump from 86 to 102; and Long Beach, from 33 to 36.
“These things are not random,” said Elliott Currie, a professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine who has authored many books on the topic, including the Pulitzer finalist, “Crime and Punishment in America.”
“For the most part, what you’re seeing is that the people and places that have always been hard hit by violent crime are being especially hard hit now. If you look at the data, there’s an extraordinary increase in homicides among people of color.”
All told, there were 2,202 murders in California in 2020, up 31% from the year before, according to data from the Attorney General’s Office.
While the number of White murder victims rose 8.5% year over year, the number of Latino victims increased 33.9% and the number of Black victims climbed 40%.
What’s happening?
It’s not just California. Nationwide, the murder rate climbed 30% from 2019 to 2020, the largest single-year increase in more than a century, the Pew Research Center found in an analysis of provisional data from the CDC.
It was the largest year-over-year increase since at least 1905 — and possibly ever — and exceeded the 20% spike measured after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Pew found.
Nationwide, there were 7.8 homicides for every 100,000 people in 2020, up from six the year before, Pew found.
California fared better on this front: Its murder rate was 5.5 per 100,000 people in 2020, up from 4.2 the year before, according to the attorney general’s data.
Why? Any criminologist worth his salt will say that no one’s sure exactly why murders have jumped so dramatically, Currie said. But experts point to the pandemic’s crippling impact on the economy and to surging gun sales that have put more firearms on the street.
“This past year truly tested people from all over the world,” said John McMahon, San Bernardino County sheriff-coroner, in his annual crime report. “The COVID-19 pandemic put a tremendous strain on the economy, everyone’s way of life, and how we interacted with each other. The pandemic affected our operations, employees and their families like I have never seen before in my 36 years in law enforcement.”
Consider Riverside County’s Hemet, where murders jumped from five to 14 in the span of a year.
“It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what factors contributed to the increase,” spokesman Alan Reyes said by email. “When looking closer at the data for context, we see about 85% (12/14) of homicides in Hemet during 2020 were at the result of someone the victim knew, whereas, in previous years, we generally see a 50/50 split between the victim knowing the suspect and the victim not knowing the suspect.”
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which serves unincorporated areas and some contract cities, also noted that the majority of homicides in its jurisdiction occurred between acquaintances or family members.
Idle hands
“To me, one of the most important factors has to do with work,” said Currie of UCI. “COVID caused a lot of people to lose their jobs and businesses, but it didn’t necessarily increase poverty levels because government doled out large amounts of money to keep people afloat. What did happen is that people didn’t get their jobs back and are only beginning to now. From a criminological point of view, that has huge consequences for violent crime in particular.
“If you take people who might be at fairly high risk away from the constraints of the workplace, now they’re idle. Maybe they’re hanging out on the street. There’s no worse place to be when it comes to being victimized by violence.”
Data is still being parsed, but intimate partner violence surely played a role as well, experts say. In households with histories of abuse, partners often lost jobs and were at stuck home together for extended periods of time.
Those factors may well ebb as the economy recovers and people get back to work, helping the murder rate tick back down.
“I’m cautiously hopeful we can see an easing off in these spikes,” Currie said. “That will be partly determined by what we do on the level of social policy.”
He expects the massive infrastructure package passed by Congress to strike at the heart of violent crime by creating good-paying jobs, and said the Build Back Better Act promises to do the same thing by investing in child care, health care, paid family leave, and intervention and social services. “All of this stuff is anti-crime,” he said.
Abundance of guns
But one contributing factor to the bloodshed will not go away: The extraordinary flood of guns that have surged into communities over recent years will remain there, even if COVID-19 disappears. That keeps the stage set for violence.
“Firearms continue to be the most common weapon used in homicides,” said the attorney general’s crime summary. “In 2020, of the homicides where the weapon was identified, 74.2% involved a firearm.”
Nationally, the rate was even higher nationwide, Pew found: Firearms were involved in 77% of murders for which data was available in 2020, up from 73% the year before.
And even though 2021 is not finished, many observers expect it to be nearly as bloody as 2020. In the 72 hours ending Friday, Dec. 3, 100 people were killed and 187 injured by gun violence in the U.S., according to the Gun Injury Archive, which tracks incidents.
America’s homicide rate is exponentially higher than other modern democracies, experts point out. In 2018, the murder rate in the United States was 5 per 100,000 people, according to World Health Organization data parsed by WorldPopulationReview.com. Canada’s rate was 1.76. In the United Kingdom and France, it was 1.2. In Sweden, Denmark and Germany, about 1. In South Korea, Switzerland and the Netherlands, about 0.6. And in Japan, 0.26.
That’s because guns are so much more freely available in the United States, and there has been a buying frenzy in recent years.
Data kept by the Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting group found that 13.9 million firearms were purchased in 2019, and 22.8 million purchased in 2020.
The FBI ran background checks on 28 million potential buyers in 2019, and 39.3 million in 2020, the group said. Those figures don’t reflect individuals, as a single person may have purchased several firearms.
“We now have more guns in high-risk communities, and they’re going to be there even when we get back to work,” Currie said. “The number of murders in America is really about the deeper, long-standing social conditions that we talk about all the time but don’t do much about — poverty and, particularly, lack of opportunity. The hopelessness, the sense anything goes, that is fostered by that absence of opportunity. Until we talk about that in a serious way, we’re not going to get far.
“But I think we’re starting to. I tend to be unreasonably optimistic that we’re eventually going to do a lot better. There are encouraging signs.”
Hopeful signs
A few California cities are bucking the trend. In San Jose, murders dropped from 47 to 40 from 2016 to 2020, and in Santa Ana, murders dropped from 23 to 15.
As of Nov. 1, the homicide count in Hemet was two. In San Bernardino, it was one less than last year as of early December.
“We’re not patting ourselves on the back to be down a little bit, but we are definitely expecting to see a decline over time,” said San Bernardino city spokesman Jeff Kraus.
The murder spike in his city and across the state was the product of a perfect storm, he said: The early release of inmates from jails and prisons to avoid the spread of COVID-19, the court system and police academies largely shutting down, hiring freezes because cities weren’t sure what their finances were going to look like.
And if one pulls back to look at all crime, it was down 17% from 2019 to 2020, largely due to a drop in burglaries, thefts and property crimes that went hand-in-hand with people working from home, he said.
San Bernardino got a grant to hire more police, will expand its force by 28 officers, and do more community policing, Kraus said.
Hemet’s Reyes said the city is strengthening partnerships with youth programs, community involvement and education, and also invested in a new firearm-sniffing canine in 2018 and license plate recognition cameras in 2020.
The cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco have banned the possession, purchase and sale of “ghost guns” — unfinished, untraceable gun kits that can be assembled at home — and many hope for a similar ban at the state level. But that wouldn’t be enough, Currie said.
“I grew up in Chicago, which is always in the news because of gun violence,” he said. “It has very strict regulations. But all you have to do is walk across the line into Indiana and you can get whatever you want. Until we get truly national policies around intelligent gun restrictions, we’re going to face this problem of a massive flood of guns into very volatile places.”
“It’s a slow incremental process, but I have some faith we’re going in the right direction.”
Credit: Source link
