Axios: “It’s Set to be a Hot, Violent Summer”

I have said from the beginning that if Joe Biden won the election, the summer of 2021 would be lot worse than the summer of 2020. Several people have disagreed with me.

Axios’ Bryan Walsh has concurred, however, saying that this is going to be a hot, violent summer.

Axios:

After a year in which murders spiked in the U.S., homicides are already trending up in many cities, presaging what is likely to be a violent summer.

Why it matters: The rise in homicides is a public health crisis that has multiple interlocking causes, which makes solving it that much more difficult. We’re still a long way from the murderous days of the 1990s, but rising gun violence is destroying lives and complicating efforts to help cities recover from COVID-19.

Driving the news: From Washington to Louisville, KentuckyNew York to Oakland, California, and Kansas City to Atlanta, murder rates are trending up in U.S. cities large and small.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assert that there are not “multiple interlocking causes,” and it is almost entirely due to the Black Lives Matter movement crippling the police.

It’s really difficult to imagine that is controversial, but I guess people need to be politically correct.

A sample of 37 cities with data available for the first three months of 2021 collected by the crime analyst Jeff Asher indicates murders are up 18% over the same period in 2020.

The continued increase comes after a year in which major U.S. cities experienced a 33% rise in homicides, and 63 of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw an increase in at least one category of violent crime, according to a report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

Between the lines: While it may be tempting to dismiss 2020 and the early indicators in 2021 as aberrations caused by the pandemic, murder rates were already ticking upward in the years before the pandemic.

After hitting a modern-day low in 2014 following a quarter-century of general decline, homicide rates began rising again in many cities.

The intrigue: Criminologists still haven’t settled on a single explanation for why violent crime dropped drastically from the 1990s, and they’re even less certain why it’s risen so dramatically over the past 16 months.

The direct and indirect effects of the pandemic almost certainly play a major role, with in-person schools closed, violence prevention programs forced to pull back and unemployment skyrocketing, especially in big cities.

But property crimes like robberies mostly continued falling, and historically there’s no clear link between periods of economic disruption and murder rates.

While some police leaders blame resourcing issues because of the nationwide marches that followed the killing of George Floyd by police last summer, with a few exceptions there’s little evidence the protests directly led to a rise in the murder rate. But a general pulling back of policing — plus the distancing effects of the pandemic itself and the closure of courts — likely contributed to more murders and fewer of them being solved.

Yeah.

It’s likely.

For sure.

The article closes by saying we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Homicide rates historically spike during the summer months, when the hotter weather puts more people on the streets, and while vaccination coverage is increasing, the pandemic and all its knock-on effects won’t be finished by then.

“Summer 2021 is going to be abnormally violent,” John Roman, a senior fellow at the economics, justice and society group at NORC at the University of Chicago, wrote this year. “It is the new normal.”

The bottom line: The historic decline in murder over the past few decades was accompanied by mass incarcerations and increasingly brutal policing, leading to what the criminologist Patrick Sharkey termed “the uneasy peace.”

As America reckons a new murder wave with policing in the post-George Floyd killing era, it needs to find a way to a lasting peace that features both safety and justice.

Obviously, there is no way to have peace while also saying that black people cannot be punished for committing violent crime.

There are two things there, and you have to pick one. The media, which is the one that gets to decide, has already decided that black people not being punished for crimes is the most important thing in the universe. They also don’t seem particularly concerned about the violence, and in fact seem to like it.

Obviously, this massive spike in murders has thus far been pretty much entirely restricted to the black community. Blacks have been showing the world how much Black Lives Matter by slaughtering each other on a scale no one has ever seen before.

However, the thing is: there is no reason to believe that blacks couldn’t get away with murdering white people at the same rate they typically murder other blacks. White people have more money than black people, so murdering us would be more profitable.

It’s almost certain that this is coming.

I told you to move out of the city.