The increase in shootings, illustrated in this analysis, can be traced to a surge of gang-related violence in deprived urban areas. This trend, already a long-term problem in certain locations, has accelerated because of the neg-ative socio-economic consequences of the lockdown measures, in particular on youth living in disadvantaged neighborhoods (Southall and Gold, 2020).
The current lockdown measures have inadvertently created a gap in the life of many inner-cities’ youth. Social institutions that used to keep city communities safe and allow youth to socialize in non-harmful ways such as schools, churches, sport activities and recreation centers, have all closed down since March. Lockdown has also created an economic recession that has negatively impacted youth and lower-income earners (Morath, E. and Dougherty, D. 2020).
In this context, gang-related violence has increased, including drive-by shootings and discharges of firearms in occupied vehicles/dwelling. These are highly dangerous incidents that have nefarious consequences to the peo-ple living in some lower-income inner city communities. For exampeo-ple, NYC Queens has recorded an increase of nearly 60% shootings between the first 6 months of 2020 and the same timeframe in 2019 (City of New York Police Department, n.d. - 2). From 7 p.m. Friday, May 29, through 5 a.m. Monday, June 1, 25 people were killed in Chicago, with another 85 wounded by gun-fire (Schuba, T., Charles, S. and Hendrickson M. 2020).
The already dire social-economic situation and the surge of gang-related gun violence, in particular among juveniles, during the COVID-19 lock-downs, were aggravated by the occasionally violent protests against police, which exposed a long-term trend in low legitimacy and trust among minor-ities of law enforcement personnel. While the economic recession and the firearm-violence wreaked havoc on some inner city areas, the increased ten-sion with policing in minority communities worsened a trend of reduction in proactive policing by local law enforcement agencies, (Mac Donald, H.
2016). This is illustrated by the reduction of crimes heavily dependent on police action for detection, such as weapon-related offenses: data from NYPD (Chart 34) show that, right when murders, linked to gun-violence, increased in the first six months of 2020, arrests for weapon-related charges decreased (City of New York Police Department, n.d. - 2).
Already some researchers pointed out, in 2015, the reduction in arrests while homicides increased in some major US cities. The partial explanation was deemed to be the “Ferguson Effect” on crime rates, which links increases in crime to reduction of pro-active policing and community-police tensions in the aftermath of widely publicized deadly encounters between the police
and African-Americans (Mac Donald, H. 2016). Furthermore, tension be-tween communities and the police could result in decreased willingness to contact them when a crime occurs or to cooperate with investigations to ap-prehend offenders (Rosenfeld R., 2016 and 2017).
12. Conclusions
The intent of this article is not to provide a general picture of violent crime throughout US major cities. As each public safety situation is depend-ent on the idiosyncrasies of the social, political and economic context in each urban area, grouping crime data from dissimilar metropolis might not allow the discernment of common trends. Instead, this brief article illustrates a pat-tern detected in four selected cities - Atlanta (GA), Chicago (IL), New York City (NY) and Philadelphia (PA): the increase of homicides and gun-violence in the first months of 2020, in particular during the concurrent COVID-19 lockdown period (which started at the end of March) and the public protests against police following the death while in police custody of Mr. George Floyd on May 25th.
The data shows that this trend is not linked to an increase in other vio-lent crimes: robberies and aggravated assaults without firearm decreased or remained similar to last year. Property crimes generally decreased during the analyzed months, with the exception of motor vehicle thefts.
The data also points to a reduction of pro-active policing, measured as the number of recorded offenses for crimes heavily dependent on police action for detection such as driving while impaired, drug-law violation and weap-on-related incidents, after the start of the protests against police, which oc-curred while COVID-19 lockdown was still in place. Data is also suggesting an inverse proportional correlation between pro-active police activities and gun-violence (Chart 34).
Such data points to the likely reduction of pro-active enforcement, and its negative consequences, after weeks of protests and criticism against police in some urban areas (Southall and Gold, 2020). This is even more worrisome in light with the recent calls to dismantle police’s gun violence units (Parks, 2020).
Additional analysis is needed to ascertain whether the recorded increases at the mentioned four major cities are only temporary, spurred by the simul-taneous but circumstantial contexts of COVID-19 lockdowns and protests against police brutality, or instead if they are ushering the start of a long-term trend characterized by an increased violence in poor, disadvantaged urban areas.
While other major cities have not recorded a similar pattern, in particular with an increase in homicides or gun-violence, it is most likely that others did.
Further research is needed to understand which cities have recorded similar trends, and why others have not followed analogous patterns.
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condizione che risulta dallo stabilizzarsi e dal mantenersi di misure proattive capaci di promuovere il benessere e la qualità della vita dei cittadini e la vitalità democratica delle istituzioni; affronta il fenomeno del Terrorismo come un processo complesso, di lungo periodo, che affonda le sue radici nelle dimensioni culturale, religiosa, politica ed economica che caratterizzano i sistemi sociali; propone alla Società – quella degli studiosi e degli operatori e quella ampia di cittadini e istituzioni – strumenti di com-prensione, analisi e scenari di tali fenomeni e indirizzi di gestione delle crisi.
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