
Crime is becoming one of America’s biggest political issues
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We do know that murders rose dramatically in many places in 2020. Cities, which maintain their own data, have shown sharp increases.
Still much lower than the ’90s in New York. These numbers, while horrifying, are still far below the more-than 2,000 annual murders New York saw in the early 1990s. Other types of violent crime are even more reduced.
The rise is everywhere. It’s not just US cities seeing a rise in murders.
“This is an American problem,” said Jeff Asher, a Louisiana-based data analyst for AH Datalytics. He tracks murder rates in 72 cities and has seen a rise almost everywhere.
“We have a tendency to see changes in murder rates through the eyes of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles just because those are big cities, they have lots of murders because they have lots of people and they tend to have relatively easily available data,” he said in a phone conversation.
“But as far as a tool for understanding why trends are happening, they’re limited in their usefulness because in this case, it was sort of historic and it was everywhere.”
One example. In South Carolina, for instance, which has a smaller population than New York City, murders were up 25% in 2020 to 571.
South Carolina had the fifth worst murder rate of any state in 2019, according to FBI data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with 11 people per 100,000 dying by homicide.
Most of the states with the worst homicide rates were in the South, although New Mexico, Alaska and Maryland had murder rates over 10 people per 100,000.
Biden, Vazquez reports, plans to sign executive actions with a particular focus on tamping down gun crimes, according to officials who spoke with reporters Tuesday night, and again called on Congress to take steps to enact new gun control laws. Senior administration officials also told reporters Tuesday evening that Biden’s plan will rely on using American Rescue Plan dollars for more flexible applications, including hiring law enforcement above pre-pandemic levels or using the funds toward community violence intervention programs.”
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