Updating Murders from 2020 & 2019
Reviewing the Data
Crime has become a significant issue because the average voter views their community becoming less safe, a trend that continues as we head toward the 2022 midterms. They have every reason to be concerned as crime is increasing and the data supports their fear. We did two analyses a year ago, first we reviewed 26 cities and found that in those cities, there was a significant increase in homicides. The second analysis dealt with how many lives that proactive policing saved. This report follows up on last year report. We compare these cities’ crime data from 2020 to 2021 and we also reviewed the two-year trend from 2019 to 2021. We also examined excess deaths using 2019 data as the baseline, following what we did for reviewing New York when we evaluated how many individuals’ lives were saved as a result of New York
crackdown on violent crime beginning in 1993 to 2019. Cities are seeing the upward trends in violent crimes that started in 2020 and continued into 2021. Chicago experienced a significant increase of murders in 2021 than the previous year, while Philadelphia set new records for murders in 2021.
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 Authorization for crowd control tactics was revoked, and the police were handcuffed by their political masters.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.”
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, Texas 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 city of Baltimore’s police budget. Portland was riding a crime wave while they cut the police budget $16 million and Los Angeles reduced their budget by $150 million dollars, San Francisco by $115 million dollars, and Philadelphia by $33 million dollars. 3 Eric Adams won his 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.”