Exhausted cities face another challenge: A surge in violence
NORTH AUGUSTA, S.C. —
Rains deluged parts of South Carolina and Georgia on Tuesday, washing out roads and forcing the closure of a state park.
Augusta, Georgia, set a new record for any July day with 4.6 inches of rain, while a National Weather Service observer in Beaufort County, South Carolina, reported nearly 10 inches. Heavy rain was also reported at Pawleys Island on the coast north of Charleston.
Widespread flooding was reported in Lincoln County, Georgia, and Edgefield County, South Carolina. Forecasters said an area of low pressure was moving through. It’s expected to move over the Atlantic Ocean and could develop into a tropical storm later this week, National Weather Service forecasters said.
Richmond County Coroner Mark Bowen said one person was killed in a two-vehicle crash Tuesday in Augusta while driving in the rain.
Firefighters near North Augusta had to rescue people by boat from homes after water breached a dam on a creek, with flooding knocking at least two houses off their foundations.
“You wouldn’t think it was going to happen on this little creek because I mean it’s only maybe a 10-foot wide, 15-foot wide creek,” Chris Franco told WJBF-TV.
Edgefield County Emergency Management Director Suzy Spurgeon said drainage pipes were torn out of some local roads.
“We got a whole lot of rain in a very short period of time,” Spurgeon told WRDW-TV.
Hunting Island State Park near Beaufort reported more than 12 inches of rain in 48 hours. The South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism said the park would be closed at least through Thursday.
Park Manager J.W. Weatherford told The Island Packet of Hilton Head that flooding surpassed 2017’s Tropical Storm Irma. Besides flooding, park managers were worried about recent patches to frequently flooded roads being ruined. State park officials plan a $3 million project to repave the park’s roads and elevate them in areas that flood frequently.
In Lincoln County, Georgia, a state highway and other roads were covered with water, although it later receded.
“I came up and looked and the bridge was not there, there was just water rushing across,” Lincoln County resident Mary Thedford said.
In this June 1 file photo, protesters rally as Philadelphia police officers and Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers look on in Philadelphia, over the death of George Floyd, a black man who was in police custody in Minneapolis. Still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic and street protests over the police killing of Floyd, exhausted cities around the nation are facing yet another challenge: A surge in recent shootings has left dozens dead, including young children.
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-athome 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.”
President Donald Trump has seized on the violence for political gain, accusing Democrats of being weak and suggesting the crime wave is being driven by recent protests calling for racial justice, police reform
NEW YORK —
and drastic cuts in law enforcement funding.
“Law and order are the building blocks of the American dream, but if anarchy prevails, this dream comes crumbling down,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh Mcenany said last week.
Police officials in New York City and elsewhere say the recent bloodshed has shown there are consequences to some reforms they see as misguided, particularly on bail reform, enacted before the protests happened but exacerbated by the moment.
Emboldened criminals feel “that the cops can’t do anything anymore, that no one likes the police, that they can get away with things, that it’s safe to carry a gun out on the street,” New York Police Department Chief Terence Monahan said this week.
Monahan’s remarks came after a holiday weekend that saw a wave of shootings leaving 10 dead. Through Sunday, shootings were up more than 53% — to 585 — so far this year.
The recent spasm of violence was captured in a New York Post headline about a crime-ravaged city crying out for help. It was nearly identical to one that ran 30 years ago — when there were more than 2,000 murders a year. But crime has been declining for more than a decade — there were about 300 last year.
Crime has spiked in other major cities, too. In Dallas,
In this July 5 photo, an officer investigates the scene of a shooting in Chicago. violent crime increased more than 14% from April to June. In Philadelphia, homicides were up 20% for the week ending July 5 over last year at this time. In Atlanta, 31 people were shot over the weekend, five fatally, compared with seven shootings and one killing over the same week in 2019.
Some police unions say officers just aren’t doing their jobs over fear of being charged with crime.
Bottoms, a Democrat, lashed out after an 8-yearold girl was shot and killed near the Atlanta Wendy’s restaurant where Rayshard Brooks died three weeks earlier in a confrontation with police who were later charged criminally.
“That’s an important movement that’s happening,” she said at a news conference. “But this random, wild, wild West shoot ’em up because you can has got to stop.”
Trump’s Georgia campaign