Police pin rise in murders on virus
Poverty, isolation are blamed for killings across US
OAKLAND, Calif. — Family and friends of Aaron Pryor say they may never know exactly why the 16-year-old star football player was killed in broad daylight on a Sunday in September in a driveway near his home. Video of the shooting viewed by family members shows an assailant, who has not been arrested, confronting the baby-faced teenager before firing more than a dozen rounds.
But his football coach, Joe Bates, does not hesitate in assigning blame. With school entirely online and football season canceled, the coronavirus shattered the young man’s life, Bates said. The mandatory 7 a.m. study halls for the team’s players, the daily three-hour practices, the Friday games that last late into the night — all of that was gone this fall. In a normal year, Pryor would have been on the field, not on the streets, the coach said.
“It was COVID that really killed this kid,” he said.
Like many U.S. cities, where economies have been ravaged by the pandemic, Oakland has seen a surge in gun violence, including six killings of juveniles since June and a 40% increase in homicides overall. In Los Angeles, the picture is equally bloody, with the city on pace to have more than 300 homicides for the first time since 2009.
Beyond California, major cities and even smaller communities are confronting the same grim pattern, with some places, like Kansas City, Missouri, and Indianapolis, setting records for the number of killings in a single year. Philadelphia, which was gripped by recent unrest after the police shooting of a Black man, is among the cities with the highest increase in homicides; its 404 killings this year are a more than 40% increase compared with the same period last year.
Criminologists studying the rise in the murder rate point to the effects the pandemic has had on everything from mental health to policing in a time of social distancing, with fewer officers able to perform the upclose-and-personal community outreach work that in normal times has helped mitigate violence. Experts also attribute the rise to increased gang violence and a spike in gun ownership, including among many firsttime gun owners.
The epidemic of murder in America loomed over the final days of a polarizing election campaign that President Donald Trump has sought to frame as a referendum on law and order. His refrain has been constant: that cities run by Democrats have let crime get out of control.
But the data show that the waves of killings have afflicted Democratic- and Republican-run cities alike.
“The increase has had nothing to do with the political affiliation of your mayor,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Rosenfeld has studied crime trends during the pandemic for the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan research organization, and found that homicides increased an average of 53% across 20 major U.S. cities during the summer.
Jeff Asher, a crime analyst in New Orleans, said the rise in killings was hitting all corners of the country. He pointed out several Republican-led cities that have seen sharp upticks: Lubbock, Texas, which has seen 22 homicides, compared with nine in the same period last year; Lexington, Kentucky, where homicides are up 40%; and Miami, where homicides have risen nearly 30%.
“Because the stresses of the pandemic are everywhere, you are seeing this everywhere,” he said. (Asher has published some of his research in The New York Times.)
In Oakland, shootings are so common — and often involve dozens of rounds of ammunition sprayed down city blocks — that both the head of Oakland’s police union and the city’s interim police chief have compared it to a war zone.
For Guillermo Cespedes, chief of the city’s Violence Prevention Department, Oakland now brings to mind another fraught region of the world: Honduras, El Salvador and other countries where gang violence is endemic.
“Right before Oakland I was working in Central America,” Cespedes said. “And this feels more difficult.”
Cespedes said he was working to understand why many of the same areas hit hardest by the coronavirus in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, were also seeing the highest levels of violence.
A study published last month by researchers at the University of California, Davis, estimated that 110,000 people in California bought guns this year because they were worried about the destabilizing effects of the pandemic. The number, based on a survey conducted over the summer, appears to be corroborated by the surge of firearm background checks this year — about 95,000 more than last year. And those are only the guns obtained through legal channels. Los Angeles has seen a 45% increase this year in the number of guns stolen from cars, some of which have later turned up in shootings.
“These are particularly
high-stress times,” said Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, the lead author of the study. “When you add a firearm into those situations it adds particularly fatal risk.”
Kravitz-Wirtz’s study says that by aggravating “poverty, unemployment, lack of resources, isolation, hopelessness and loss” the pandemic has “worsened many of the underlying conditions contributing to violence.”
Aside from the destabilizing effects of the pandemic, the widespread public criticism of the police that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis may have had an impact on the rise in violent crime, Rosenfeld said.
He noted that after the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, following the police shooting of Michael Brown, homicides similarly increased in U.S. cities. Some analysts have called this the “Ferguson effect” and have offered two explanations that may help explain the current rise in homicides: that police have pulled back from patrolling some neighborhoods and that residents, particularly in communities of color, stopped turning to the police out of a lack of trust, leading to more disputes being settled violently.
His research found that other categories of crime, such as residential burglaries, larceny and drug offenses, have declined during the pandemic.