America’s most underserved areas saw gun crime rise early in pandemic – study
In the first five months of the pandemic, violence increased in the nation’s most underserved communities, according to a recent study from the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis.
The study, published on 9 December in the American Journal of Public Health, compared zip codes in 13 major US cities, from Los Angeles to Boston, to see how gun violence affected “disadvantaged” areas versus “privileged” ones based on racial and economic segregation. Researchers compared the rates of gun violence in the given areas from 2018 through 2020. They found that people living in the zip codes that fell in the disadvantaged category were subject to a dramatically higher level of gun violence than their wealthier neighbors were.
“Unfortunately the findings were not that surprising. Disparities in violence have existed for a long time and the pandemic was impacting structures in the communities that have endured the greatest burden,” said Julia Schleimer, the study’s lead researcher.
Overall, Schleimer and her team found, gun homicides and assaults increased by 27.7% and 4% in March through July of 2020 compared to the average figure for the same period of 2018 and 2019. When the team analyzed zip code-level firearm violence data against the racial makeup and income levels of people within those areas, they found that racial disparities were deeply entrenched in neighborhoods.
The locales where low-income Black residents and people of color were concentrated were among the most disadvantaged, and on average each zip code analyzed by Schleimer and her team saw 14 additional incidents of gun firearm violence, 150 more aggravated assaults and five more homicides than the most privileged areas.
“This research is measuring the lived experiences of people who live in these communities, it’s not news to them,” Schleimer said. “I would hope that studies like this are illuminating to people who may be unaware of the toll violence takes on communities other than their own.”
The findings from Schleimer and her team are backed up by numerous news reports of gun violence hitting Black and Latino communities the hardest and official crime data released by the FBI that revealed the largest single-year increase in homicides in six decades. And while homicides were up across the US, in cities with liberal and conservative leadership, this increase did not affect all locales and racial groups equally. In California, where Black people make up about 6% of the population, they accounted for 31% of the state’s homicide victims in 2020, according to the state attorney general.
Schleimer hopes more academics and research institutions will dig into the ways race and economics affect gun violence rates throughout the nation and that these findings will make their way to the eyes of those in power.
“Around the country we’re talking about racism more broadly and as a nation we need to do a better job of recognizing this history,” Schleimer says. “Having these numbers about gun violence and the research behind them can be important for policymakers who say, ‘Show me the data, show me the evidence.’”