The Mayor Blames the Virus for Shootings. Heres What Crime Data Shows

Alan Feuer, "The Mayor Blames the Virus for Shootings. Here’s What Crime Data Shows,"New York Times, August 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/nyregion/nyc-shootings-coronavirus.html

The Mayor Blames the Virus for Shootings. Here’s What Crime Data Shows

In the past few weeks, Mayor Bill de Blasio and his police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, have tied the steep rise in shootings in New York City to a breakdown in the criminal justice system that they contend has allowed criminals back out on the streets.

The mayor and commissioner have cited a range of causes that they have portrayed as outside their control: the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, as well as measures approved by the State Legislature, including one that eliminated cash bail for many defendants.

But a confidential analysis of police data, conducted by city officials but not released to the public, offers little if any evidence to back up their claims. In fact, the analysis, obtained by The New York Times, suggests the state’s new bail law and the mass release of inmates from city jails in recent months because of the coronavirus outbreak played almost no role in the spike in shootings.

Of the 1,500 inmates let out of Rikers from March 16 to April 30, only seven had been rearrested on a weapons charge by mid-July, according to the confidential analysis.

Nearly 2,000 people who in July had open gun cases were allowed to go home to await trial, but only about 40 of those defendants were arrested on another weapons charge while they were out, the analysis said.

Instead, the analysis points to a different possible reason for the wave of shootings: The number of arrests for gun crimes has plummeted.

While murders and shootings have surged, reports of other major crimes have actually fallen in recent months. Still, the spike in gun violence has stirred deep fears that the city might be sliding back to an era of random violence on the streets. Recent shooting victims have included a two teenagers going to play basketball and a baby boy.

New York City is not alone. Shootings have skyrocketed in major cities across the country, and that surge has led to intense political fights over whether efforts to rein in the police, including the Defund the Police movement touched off by the killing of George Floyd, are playing a role.

On Sunday, another 19 people were shot in New York City, one fatally. Through the first seven months of this year, shootings were up 72 percent over the same period last year and murders rose 30 percent, even as reports of other violent crimes like rape, assault and robbery fell.

The police say feuds between street gangs are behind most of the incidents, and so far detectives have been unable to make enough arrests to stop reprisals. The pandemic and the need to divert investigators to cover widespread protests have set back investigations, police officials said.

In recent days, Mr. de Blasio has been particularly critical of the courts, saying that the lack of trials because of the pandemic and the inability of prosecutors to push cases forward with indictments were “a huge piece” of the spike in violent crime.

“The bottom line is our criminal justice system needs to get back to full strength,” Mr. de Blasio said. “Our courts not only need to reopen, they need to reopen as fully and as quickly as possible.”

But prosecutors, court officials and defense lawyers have pushed back against that theory.

Lawrence Marks, the state’s chief administrative judge, told the NY1 cable news station that the mayor’s attacks on the courts were “false, misleading and irresponsible.”

Judge Marks countered that the rise in violent crime was more likely a result of the sharp drop in gun arrests in recent months, a position that the department’s own data seems to buttress.

In mid-May, gun arrests citywide began to drop precipitously, the city analysis of police data shows. During the week of May 24, there were 113 gun arrests. During the week of June 7, there were 71 such arrests. By the week of June 28, there were only 22.

Over the same period, the data shows, shootings started rising. During the week of May 24, there were 23 shootings; in the week of June 7, there were 40. In the week of June 28, the number of shootings spiked to 63.

At a new conference on Tuesday, Mr. de Blasio said the city had deployed more officers to troubled precincts, and gun arrests were beginning to rise again. During the week ending on July 27, arrests for firearms climbed up back up to 54, the police said.

The confidential analysis that was obtained by The Times was prepared by city officials with Police Department data and shared with the city’s district attorneys’ offices. It was provided to The Times by an official who wanted to counter the mayor’s narrative, but wished to remain anonymous because the report was not intended to be released.

On Tuesday, Mr. de Blasio denied that he had ever blamed the rise in violent crime solely on the changes the pandemic had wrought on the courts. He said he had always cited a “perfect storm” of causes, including the virus’s devastating effect on the city’s economy.

Still, he said that the slowdown in the courts and the lack of trials had affected the behavior of some people, sending a signal that there would not be consequences for their acts. “And it affects the ability to ensure that someone who should not be on the street, isn’t,” he added.

“You cannot take away all the underpinnings of normal life and expect the same outcome, and then when you don’t have all of the pieces of the criminal justice system working, that does affect the reality,” he said.

But the city’s own analysis suggests the bail law, which allows many defendants accused of nonviolent crimes to be released before trial without posting bail, had little to do with the rise in violence. It notes that shooting incidents stayed relatively stable for more than four months after the legislation was passed.

The analysis also indicates that the courts are processing gun crimes at close to the same rate as before the pandemic. According to the Police Department’s data, there were 2,181 unresolved gun cases in July — slightly fewer than the 2,285 gun cases that were open in December 2019.

Similarly, the courts handled 642 gun and murder arraignments from October 2019 to December 2019. Between April and June of this year, they handled 819 gun and murder arraignments — and all of them were conducted remotely by video.

“The way we are processing arrests has not changed at all,” said Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., the Manhattan district attorney. “In May, the volume and severity of the arrests we were handling was the same as it was in January. We’re open.”

Darcel D. Clark, the Bronx district attorney, said that her office’s complaint room, where new crimes are charged, was “running at full strength” — albeit virtually.

“It is wrong to say that the district attorneys are not prosecuting or that the court system is not functioning,” Ms. Clark said.

Court records in Brooklyn, which has seen some of the worst gun violence in recent weeks, suggest there is little sign that the release of people from jail was driving most of the shootings there.

From June 15 to July 15, according to court records, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office opened a total of five prosecutions of defendants for shootings or for homicides with guns.

None of the defendants, an analysis of the records showed, had been released from Rikers Island because of the pandemic or had been sent back home on a separate case under the new, more lenient bail law. Nor were they free because of the slowdown in court proceedings, the records showed.

Still, Michael LiPetri, the Police Department’s chief of crime control strategies, said that the virus’s effects on the criminal justice system were being felt on the streets.

Early in the pandemic, Chief LiPetri said, many suspects arrested on gun charges who in the past would have been asked to post bail were instead released without bail to stem the spread of disease in jail.

So far this year, he said, 40 percent of all gun suspects were released on their own recognizance, compared to only 25 percent last year, and about 35 percent had bail set, compared to 55 percent last year.

The large number of people being sent home to await trial, even with a serious gun charge, he said, had created a permissive atmosphere, especially among gang members who the police believe are driving the wave of shootings.

“When people get arrested and then get out, their crew members start feeling comfortable carrying firearms,” he said.

Chief LiPetri acknowledged the number of gun arrests had dropped off, saying that the force was stretched thin because of the pandemic and the need to redeploy people to cover protests.

In the past month, he said, the department has started moving robbery detectives to work on violent crime and has shifted more than 300 officers in administrative positions to precincts with high numbers of shootings.

“We were stretched — even an agency as big as the N.Y.P.D.,” he said.

Jon Hilsenrath, "Homicide Spike Hits Most Large U.S. Cities,"Wall Street Journal, August 2, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/homicide-spike-cities-chicago-newyork-detroit-us-crime-police-lockdown-coronavirus-protests-11596395181

Homicide Spike Hits Most Large U.S. Cities

A sharp rise in homicides this year is hitting large U.S. cities across the country, signaling a new public-safety risk unleashed during the coronavirus pandemic, and amid recession and a national backlash against police tactics.

The murder rate is still low compared with previous decades, and other types of serious crime have dropped in the past few months. But researchers, police and some residents fear the homicide spike, if not tamed, could threaten an urban renaissance spurred in part by more than two decades of declining crime.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of crime statistics among the nation’s 50 largest cities found that reported homicides were up 24% so far this year, to 3,612. Shootings and gun violence also rose, even though many other violent crimes such as robbery fell.

Police, researchers, mayors and community leaders see a confluence of forces at work in the homicide spike. Institutions that keep city communities safe have been destabilized by lockdown and protests against police. Lockdowns and recession also mean tensions are running high and streets have been emptied of eyes and ears on their communities. Some attribute the rise to an increase in gang violence.

Some cities with long-running crime problems saw their numbers rise, including Philadelphia, Detroit and Memphis, Tenn. Chicago, the worst-hit, has tallied more than one of every eight homicides.

Less-violent places have been struck as well, such as Omaha, Neb., and Phoenix. In all, 36 of the 50 cities studied saw homicide rise at double-digit rates, representing all regions of the country.

“I was surprised at the consistency of the increase across all of the different cities,” said Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor and director of its Crime Lab, which researches crime, after examining the Journal data.

One explanation for the divergence between homicide and other crime might reside in what is known as “routine activity theory,” which holds that crime is a function of three factors: The supply of offenders, the supply of victims and the intervention between the two by society’s guardians—including police, schools and churches.

Homicides, on the other hand, are up because violent criminals have been emboldened by the sidelining of police, courts, schools, churches and an array of other social institutions by the reckoning with police and the pandemic, say analysts and law-enforcement officials in several cities.

Anecdotally, many police departments point to a rising tide of gang violence, in which rival groups of mainly young offenders battle over control of neighborhoods, catching rivals and innocents in the process.

Schools let out young adults in March because of the pandemic and after-school activities largely stopped. Churches and other social institutions were restrained for the sake of social distancing. Police first were hit by coronavirus and then blowback in the neighborhoods they patrol after the killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a Black man, while in police custody.

“Gangs are built around structure and lack thereof,” said Jeff La Blue, a spokesman for the Fresno police department. “With schools being closed and a lot of different businesses being closed, the people that normally would have been involved in positive structures in their lives aren’t there.” He noted shootings and stabbings have soared in his community. “Nerves are high. People are short on money.”

Some researchers say the upward trend in murder might be evidence of a fraying of the social order. “Everything that society does that might shape public safety was turned upside-down during the pandemic,” Mr. Ludwig said.

Police say homicide increases are hitting low-income, mostly Black and Latino communities especially hard. The crime maps published by many cities show homicides aren’t up in city centers where antipolice protests are happening, but instead in low-income neighborhoods outside of those city centers.

In Portland, for instance, the police department didn’t see any homicides around protests in July, a department spokeswoman said. Through June, its latest crime maps show, all of its homicides happened east and south of the city center.

Mr. Ludwig studied maps of homicides in Chicago and found killings were concentrated in the south and west, “the most disadvantaged neighborhoods that were already suffering the most from longstanding economic challenges and the coronavirus,” he said. The pace is accelerating: Of 433 homicides in Chicago as of July 26, 106 were in the previous 28 days.

Mr. Trump has blamed increased violence in U.S. cities on Democratic Party leadership in hard-hit municipalities. His decision to send federal agents into U.S. cities, he said, was to help fight violent crime.

Though many of America’s biggest cities are run by Democrats, the rise in killings is a bipartisan problem. Homicides are rising at a double-digit rate in most of the big cities run by Republicans, including Miami, San Diego, Omaha, Tulsa, Okla., and Jacksonville, Fla., as well as in cities run by Democrats and in the two major cities run by Independents: San Antonio and Las Vegas.

The Journal’s statistical analysis was based on individual police department reports about crime in their cities. Some public-information departments made data available. The University of Chicago’s Crime Lab helped fill in some blanks and reviewed the Journal data.

Chicago police say conflict springs from tit-for-tat gang violence, including drive-by shootings. In one recent attack on the city’s South Side, shooters in a Chevrolet Malibu fired 60 times from a car, injuring 15 people attending the funeral of a man who himself had been killed in a drive-by shooting days before, apparently in retaliation for an earlier shooting, according to local reports. People at the latest funeral returned gunfire.

“Men in my program are being killed right now,” he said, noting that five people in the program, which currently has about 220 people enrolled, were killed in the five weeks from Memorial Day to July 4, including one who was walking away from a confrontation.

State and city grants that he expected to come through were put on hold. Mr. Bocanegra has cut staff from 120 to 100 and trimmed enrollment in the program from 18 months to 12. It has gotten harder to place men in the program into jobs, he said, and he worries it is only going to get tougher to tap funds as organizations fight for scarce public and philanthropic dollars.

Michael LiPetri, chief of crime control strategies at the New York Police Department, said the city’s rise in homicide is worst in Brooklyn, where shootings have broken out at large gatherings such as barbecues in public parks and outdoor dice games.

The department is moving officers to Brooklyn from larceny units, where the work has slowed. City policy has made it harder to keep the peace, Mr. LiPetri said. He cited a city council decision in June that exposes New York officers to criminal charges if they kneel on the chest or back of suspects. Public anger at police is also an impediment, he said: “It is impossible for a New York City police officer to break up those large gatherings.”

New York, Detroit and Fresno officers all said the easing of bail requirements in their states likely returned some dangerous criminals to the streets.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has acknowledged police concerns about the new restrictions on police tactics but in July said, “I believe we can make it work.” In a statement to the Journal, the New York mayor’s office added, “It’s a perfect storm out there. Not only are the courts not fully open, but don’t fail to notice that there is a historic pandemic and economic crisis right now.”

Homicide this year is still far lower than it was in the past. In 1990, for example, New York City alone had 2,262 murders, about equal to the total number of killings in the nation’s largest 25 cities so far this year.

Between 1993 and 2018, violent crime in U.S. cities dropped 54%. After 2000, the pace of that decline in cities was faster than in suburbs and rural communities, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics crime victimization surveys.

It is hard to tell if the long-run trends that transformed many U.S. cities for the better are now reversing, or if instead this will be a spike. A great deal hangs on that question, experts say.

“If the city descends into the level of danger that we saw in the 1970s, that will be a challenge for all of America,” said Edward Glaeser, an urban economist at Harvard University.

Alan Feuer, "The Mayor Blames the Virus for Shootings. Here’s What Crime Data Shows,"New York Times, August 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/nyregion/nyc-shootings-coronavirus.html

"... In mid-May, gun arrests citywide began to drop precipitously, the city analysis of police data shows. During the week of May 24, there were 113 gun arrests. During the week of June 7, there were 71 such arrests. By the week of June 28, there were only 22. Over the same period, the data shows, shootings started rising. During the week of May 24, there were 23 shootings; in the week of June 7, there were 40. In the week of June 28, the number of shootings spiked to 63...."