Posted on 07/09/2020 9:38:59 AM PDT by Mount Athos
Still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic and street protests over the police killing of George Floyd, exhausted cities around the nation are facing yet another challenge: a surge in shootings that has left dozens dead, including young children.
The spike defies easy explanation, experts say, pointing to the toxic mix of issues facing America in 2020: an unemployment rate not seen in a generation, a pandemic that has killed more than 130,000 people, stay-at-home orders, rising anger over police brutality, intense stress, even the weather.
“I think it’s just a perfect storm of distress in America,” said Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms after a weekend of bloodshed in her city.
Jerry Ratcliffe, a Temple University criminal justice professor and host of the “Reducing Crime” podcast, put it more bluntly: “Anybody who thinks they can disentangle all of this probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about."
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Oh, I think people can take a look around and see for themselves what suddenly changed right before the uptick in violence. In Atlanta specifically, it wasn’t a “perfect storm of distress”; it was the decision to file charges against two police officers in the Rayshard Brooks case before the investigation could be finished. That led to an initial blue-flu walkout by police and a sharp retreat in assertiveness ever since. That all but announced “open season” on the streets, and the violent recognized it better than the politicians and the media.
That has been the trend in all these cities — protests, followed by retreats by city leadership on enforcing the law. Some of this definitely preceded the protests. For instance, California went as far as making burglaries and thefts under $950 into misdemeanors, which unsurprisingly resulted in an increase of those crimes. Bail reform put more criminals on the streets, so much so that New York governor Andrew Cuomo supported a rollback of those reforms this spring. The COVID-19 lockdown undoubtedly contributes to the general unrest and unease, too.
The increase in violent crime, however, has a very recent and relatively precise starting point. And that was when politicians across the country began demanding reductions in policing, and some — like Minneapolis — began working to dismantle it altogether. The police officers on the job know very well that they have less support from their community leadership, and are much less likely to take risks to intervene than they were three months ago. That’s not just in Atlanta, but in every major city in America, followed closely by the surge in violence that “defies easy explanation.”
That’s nonsense, but it’s also pretty much par for the course. The media narrative is that there are no trade-offs for reducing or even eliminating law enforcement. The people on the front lines, especially here in Minneapolis, know better. True police reform requires more resources and better tactics, not fewer resources and no tactics. It took us decades to learn that lesson; let’s hope it doesn’t take us decades to relearn it.
Seeds of anger, bitterness, resentment, hopelessness, lack of self-worth, victimhood, self-pity and other such thoughts of downtroddeness.
Unexpected!
AP Wonders: “Are the instructions to Breathe to breathe in, breathe in again, then again, and then out again? Or Breathe out, in ,in out out out? Why am i so dizzy?”
Must be pollen? Perhaps moonbeams?
DUH.....
They explained it all. Then said it isn’t easy to pinpoint.
As far as retreating on laws and enforcement, just compare them to Giuliani in the ‘90s and what happened there. Completely undone by DeBlase.
Sorry I should have explained. The first half of what i posted is an AP article. The second half is a blog writer criticising that article.
There is an easy explanation, and it doesn’t defy anything. The democrat party has recently given blm and other street mobs permission to steal, burn, attack people, rape, destroy and kill. It has demonized police and forbidden them to deal with non-White criminals, and so non-White criminals feel that nothing is going to stop them from their criminal acts, especially if they’re against Whites.
Flammatory, but true.
The changing of felonies to misdemeanors?
The emptying of jails and prisons?
The elimination of bail?
Gee, what could it possibly be?
Ummm...
Jeez, this is a hard one.
Could it be...
DEMOCRATS???
That’s because the college educated but not intelligent idiots have to overthink the question while ignoring the obvious, because as we all know, it’s never the obvious even though it usually is.
Coincidence is another name for a bad theory.
Stupid people can’t figure out anything at all.
The truth is divisive.
How dare you?
;-)
Hot weather doesn't seem to cause violence in white communities so hot weather is racially biased.
Or maybe hot weather is a discredited social construct we need to abolish.
Surge in big city Violence is Always because of Marxist Commie Leftist Policies.
The seeds of no future because of broken political promises, selling out our middle class and dogmatic belief in the democratic party.
This is really surprising. With the pullback of the police and their oppression, I had been expecting that our inner cities would explode with new Ivy League degrees, patent filings and new foundations to promote the arts.
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