Rise in Crime 2020

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Crime Increase Impact

Crime has become a significant issue because the average voter views their community becoming less safe. They have every reason to be concerned as crime is increasing. We did two analyses, first we reviewed 26 cities and found that in those cities, there was a significant increase crime. The second analysis dealt with how many lives proactive policing saves.

Many cities are seeing the upward trends in violent crimes in 2020 continuing into 2021. Chicago is on its way to seeing more murders in 2021 and Portland has seen a 700% increase homicide from 2020 according to Seattle Times.1 In Chicago, a mob dragged a couple, Gyovanny Arzuaga and Yasmin Perez from their car before executing them while the couple were celebrating Puerto Rico Day. Eighty-two people were shot in Chicago the first three days of the fourth of July weekend and 14 of them were killed.

Phillip Carl Salzman, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at McGill University and Sr. Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently observed, “The death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer gave the Democrat Party affiliate, Black Lives Matter, a free pass to engage in months of rioting, looting, arson, assaults on police officers, and murders of citizens, always characterized by the Democrat media as ‘peaceful protests.’ In most Democrat cities, police were told to stand back or stand down as the cities burned. Authorization for crowd control tactics was revoked, and the police were handcuffed by their political masters. The rioters remained in control, and damage to public and private property across the country was in the billions…Race activists dismissed criticism about the burning down of both public properties owned by all citizens, and private businesses, in many cases owned by minority members, as unwarranted. They said that attacks on police were justified. Activists claimed that looting was unimportant; it was only ‘things.’ Furthermore, they claimed, looting was justified as ‘reparations’ for slavery.”2

In this environment Democratic mayors and city councils cut the budgets of their Police departments significantly throughout 2020. In New York, Bill De Blasio disbanded the anticrime undercover unit whose main responsibility was keeping illegal guns off the street and cut the police budget by one billion dollars. Austin cut their budget by $150 million dollars and the Seattle female black police chief resigned when $20.5 million dollars was cut from her budget. The Baltimore Sun reported that $22 million dollars were cut from its police budget. Portland is amid a crime wave while they cut the police budget $16 million and Los Angeles reduced their budget by $150 million dollars and San Francisco by $115 million dollars, and Philadelphia by $33 million dollars.3

Eric Adams won the recent election in New York by talking tough on crime and much of his margin was in those areas directly impacted by increased crime. Steve Cuozzo noted about Adams’ victory, “Inhabitants of lower-income, high-crime, mostly minority neighborhoods turned out for Adams in huge numbers, up to 70 percent of votes… Voters in areas of high crime, like East New York, came out in droves for Adams, a former cop who has defended proactive police tactics such as stop and frisk… Adams’ narrow, 8,400-vote margin over Garcia was built on support from neighborhoods where chronic bloodshed is a way of life. Their residents want more, not less, police protection notwithstanding Wiley’s assertion that defunding cops was what people of color really craved…In the 75th Precinct of Brooklyn’s East New York, which has seen nine murders and 34 shootings in 2021, Adams clobbered all others with up to 77.9 percent of the vote. He also took up to 60 percent in the Southwest Bronx’s 44th Precinct where there were eight murders and 44 shootings so far this year.”4

Before 2020, New York saw a significant decline in crime over three decades but De Blasio, accepting the Blacks Lives Matter view on crime and moving toward defunding police, resulted in significant rise in crime, mostly in minorities neighborhood.

Our own polling of minority voters from the 2020 found defunding the police was unpopular. In Colorado, two-thirds of Hispanic voters oppose defunding the police and black voters in both Michigan and Pennsylvania also opposed defunding the police, with 55% of blacks opposed defunding the police in Michigan to 28% supporting it and in Pennsylvania, it was 50% to 37%.

Many of these increases in crime occurred in minority neighborhoods. The Marshal projects reviewed data and concluded, “From 2019 to 2020 homicides in nine cities rose by 722, according to police data. More than 85% of the increase took place in predominately Black and Hispanic neighborhood, where homicide rates were already higher than White and Asian neighborhoods.”5

In the nine cities reviewed by Marshal Project, there were 2525 murders in 2019 and increased to 3358 murders for an increase of 833 excess homicides--a 25% increase. Approximately 708 of these excess deaths were minorities. The only city to see a decrease was Baltimore but then with these numbers, Baltimore still has one of the worse murder rates in United States and had over 300 deaths for the last seven years. Based on population, Baltimore rates would ten times of New York.

Our research showed that in reviewing data from 26 cities with Democratic mayors, there was significant increase in murders from 2019 to 2020. In a review of 26 large cities, Americas Majority Foundation found that 25 had increases in murders with 6024 murders in 2020 compared to 4337 in 2019. (The exception was Baltimore but as mentioned previously, Baltimore numbers are still high.) Increases ranged from 11% in Indianapolis to 114% in Louisville. This represents is 1,649 excess murders in 25 cities and a 28% increase from 2019 to 2020. If the Marshall project data holds for all 26 cities, 1,434 of these excess murders were
minorities.6

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Footnotes

  1. In Portland, shootings and homicides soar, and activists take to the street to protest the
    violence. May 31, 2021. Seattle Times Hal Berntain
  2. Domestic Officials are the real Terrorist PJ Media, July 2, 2021, Phillip Carl Salzman
  3. Domestic Officials are the real Terrorist PJ Media, July 2, 2021, Phillip Carl Salzman
  4. Eric Adams prove that Liberals out of Touch, July 10, 2021 Steve Cuozzo, New York Post
  5. Murders Rose Last Year, Black and Hispanics Neighborhoods were hit hardest The Marshall
    Project 4/8/2021
  6. 16,425 murders in US in 2019 (FBI https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topicpages/murder)

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