By Tom Donelson
Senior Fellow and Project Director – Americas Majority Foundation
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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. 1
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 Authorization for crowd control tactics was revoked, and the police were handcuffed by their political masters.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, 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.” 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 in 2020 and those trends continues through 2021.
In the nine cities reviewed by Marshal Project, there were 2525 murders in 2019 and increased to 3357 murders in 2020 for an increase of 832 homicides–a 25% increase and additional 183 deaths in 2021 for an additional 5% increase. In these cities, we saw 30% increase homicide from 2019 and 90% of these murders were concentrated in minority areas.
Approximately 913 of these deaths over a two-year period were minorities. The only city to see a decrease was Baltimore, but 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 be ten times of New York. 5
89% of these cities saw increases in 2020 from 2019 and 67% of these same cities still saw increases in homicides in 2021 from 2020. Overall, 89% of cities saw increases over the two years period and the one city that showed decreases from 2019 was Baltimore and Baltimore murder numbers are still extremely high and is number two in the United States on a per capita basis. 6
The FBI’s most recent data showed an explosion of homicide as NPR reported, “The number of murders in the United States jumped by nearly 30% in 2020 compared with the previous year in the largest single-year increase ever recorded in the country, according to official FBI statistics released Mondays, the data shows 21,570 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, which is a staggering 4,901 more than in 2019. The tally makes clear — in concrete terms — just how violent last year was.” 7 And FBI showed that these increases were more diffuse as NPR reported, “Jeff Asher, a data consultant who studies crime rates, said the increase is the largest since national records began being kept in 1960s.,,The murder rate is still below its historic peaks reached in the 1990s, but the figures from 2020 show the problem has become much more widespread…In the ’90s, New York and Los Angeles accounted for 13.5% of all murders nationally. Last year, it was under 4%,” he said. “So, it’s a lot more diffuse than it was in the ’90s.” 8
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, cities measured by Marshall Project 2019 2020 Baltimore numbers are still high.) Increases ranged from 11% in Indianapolis to 114% in Louisville. This represents is 1,649 additional murders in 25 cities and a 28% increase from 2019 to 2020. These increases continued through 2021 in these cities as these cities saw another 6% increases. 94% of these cities saw increases in 2020 from 2019 and 73% saw increases from 2020 to 2021. Overall, 94% saw significant increases from 2019 and if the Marshall project data holds for all 26 cities, 90% of these murders occurred in minority dominated neighborhoods. 9
Overall, nearly 2000 individuals more were murdered compared to 2019.This represents a 34% increase from 2019 and these numbers are validated by both the Marshall project and FBI data.
Excess Deaths
Another way to look at this is to review a city that for a period of three decades succeeded in reducing their murder rate. New York City, starting in the early 1990’s engaged in proactive policing and succeeded in turning the city into the safest major city in United States. From 1993 to 2013, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg protected New York and even Bill De Blasio did truly little to challenge the tactics until 2020 in which he overturned those successful tactics and cut the budget by a billion dollars. From a peak of 1,946 murders in 1993 when Rudy Giuliani was elected, New York murders dropped to 318 in 2019. Using 1993 numbers as the baseline, we calculated that 35,434 lives have been saved by proactive police tactics. To calculate this number, we took the number of murders each year and subtracted the total from 1993 baseline. If the murder rates had stayed at the 1993 baseline, 35,434 more people would have been murdered. A little more than 30,000 murdered were minorities showing that the biggest benefactors of proactive police tactics were minorities. (This is based on data provided by Marshall project that 90 percent of these murders occurred in minority neighborhood.)
We did a similar analysis with our data. The baseline for New York) was 319 in 2019 and if these trends continued, there would be 638 murders over the two years of 2020 and 2021. There were 953 deaths, representing an increase of 315 deaths over the 2019 baseline.In reviewing the data of all 26 cities, there were 3,761 excess deaths from the 2019 baseline.
Conclusion
The human toll of the COVID Pandemic is not just deaths from infections, lives altered from serious infections and second order effects from the lockdowns like declines in screenings for cancer, delays in treatment for serious medical conditions and massive economic losses for working class Americans that hit minorities and women the hardest. Thousands more were killed or severely injured because of policies that led to increases in murder and shootings, battery, and assault. Crime has become a major issue and for good reason, the three decades of violent crime reduction had been reversed in 2020 and continue through 2021. The reason is simple, many Democratic mayors and city councils took their lead from the radicals of Black Lives Matter and in the name of social justice, significantly reduce police budgets and police presences in many minority communities. Being murdered is not an improvement in social justice. The result has been increased crime, in particular minority communities. While Democrats will claim they are not supporting “defunding the police”, many Democrats on local levels cut their police budgets by billions and restricted policing activities. Paul Cassel writing in Reason magazine observed, “
As the New York elections showed, many minorities chose protection and reduction of crime for they did not view higher crime rates in their neighborhood as either benefit or social justice. Republicans have an opportunity to expand their 2020 coalition as voters are seeing the results of Democratic policies on their neighborhoods. Less safe neighborhoods mean less opportunities for economic prosperity and opportunities to succeed. Crime is not just a wedge issue but is an issue of life and death.
We estimate that were nearly 3800 murders from the baseline of 2019 and the question that remains who speak for those 3800 whose deaths was preventable by sound policies that worked to reduce deaths for the previous three decades. New York shows that aggressive policing saved lives and based on the baseline when Rudy Giuliani took over in 1993, 35,000 New Yorkers lives were saved, most of these lives saved were people of color.
The violence continued into 2021.
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Footnotes
- Data Show Violent Crime Has Been On The Rise For Last 3 Years In Chicago – CBS Chicago (cbslocal.com), 2021 was Philadelphia’s deadliest year on record for homicides (msn.com)
- Domestic Officials are the real Terrorist PJ Media, July 2, 2021, Phillip Carl Salzman
- Domestic Officials are the real Terrorist PJ Media, July 2, 2021, Phillip Carl Salzman
- Eric Adams proves that Liberals out of Touch, July 10, 2021, Steve Cuozzo, New YorkPost
- Murders Rose Last Year, Black and Hispanics Neighborhoods were hit hardest TheMarshall Project 4/8/2021
- FBI data 2020, 1. St. Louis, Missouri – Highest murder rates in the U.S. – The deadliestcities – CBS News
- NPR All things considered September 27, 2021
- NPR All things considered September 27, 2021
- Murders Rose Last Year, Black and Hispanics Neighborhoods were hit hardest TheMarshall Project 4/8/2021