San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Looking for clues as killings skyrocket
Gun availability, pandemic cited as factors in state
California officials recently released data showing that homicides in the state were up 31% in 2020. But the reasons for the spike — the largest percentage increase in years — are still unclear.
The surge — while not unique to California — comes after a yearslong downward trend in the state’s homicide rate. But 2020 was an exceptional year, and crime experts, government officials and advocates alike wonder whether the spike can be attributed to the economic and social strain caused by the pandemic.
“We’re really talking about highly unusual times that really
upended our lives in so many ways,” said Magnus Lofstrom, a policy director and senior fellow at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.
He stressed that all of the changes and uncertainties of the past year make it hard to pinpoint any one cause of the “sudden and notable” spike.
Oakland City Council Member Loren Taylor — whose district has been affected by violent crime — also said he thinks several factors have contributed to last year’s increase in violence, including worsening economic and mental health conditions, isolation and lack of access to social services due to the pandemic.
Both Lofstrom and Taylor also pointed to an increase in gun sales as a potential factor — 2020 set the record for handguns sold in a year, according to state data, and roughly threequarters of the year’s homicides were committed with guns.
Rachel Marshall, a spokesperson for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, said officials “are concerned about increased access to guns that has no doubt played a role in this trend,” pointing to the prosecutors’ new program to help take firearms out of the hands of people who pose a risk to themselves or others by building on a statewide gun violence restraining order law.
Garen Wintemute, an expert on gun violence and the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, said that the increase in availability and number of firearms “without a doubt” has to do with the increase in violence. But statistically, it’s difficult to separate that factor — more firearms — from the other factors that are driving violence.
On top of that, some of the factors that are driving up the homicide rate — high unemployment, instability and anxiety — are also driving up gun sales, he said.
Taylor also said Oakland’s celebrated violencereduction program, Ceasefire, was forced to cut its inperson programming in 2020 because of social distancing guidelines. The program, whose goal is reducing gangrelated shootings by focusing on individuals “at the greatest risk of shooting or being shot,” according to its website, is credited for helping to reduce gun crime in Oakland by 50% over seven years.
Experts note that though homicides are up, the numbers are still relatively low compared with the violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Statistically, 2019 was a historically low year for homicides. Lofstrom, however, said that while this context is important, minimizing last year’s violence is “a dangerous path to walk down.”
“As much as we’re putting it into perspective and saying ‘we have seen these numbers before,’ we’re still talking about more than 2,000 homicide victims in the state of California,” Lofstrom said. “That is tragic.”
“We should be worried,” Wintemute added. “This is a sustained increase, so far, unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”
How to respond to the rise in violence, however, is still under debate.
Cat Brooks with the AntiPolice Terror Project, an antiviolence group that advocates for defunding police agencies, said she thinks the way out requires a “multipronged” response, including investing in “trauma responders” like counselors and social workers who can help alleviate social issues “on the front end.”
To her, police are not the answer — “they don’t prevent crime, they respond to crime,” she said.
“If we continue to fail to address the root causes of stress and trauma in our communities, the numbers are going to continue to go up,” she said. “I guarantee you we’re not going to incarcerate our way out of this problem. We never have; I don’t know why we think we’re going to do it now.”
But in a news conference following the Oakland City Council’s vote to shift about $18 million from the police budget to violence intervention and prevention as well as social services, Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong said that a surge in violent crime makes it more crucial to increase police funding, and that the social services and violenceprevention programs meant to replace officers are not fully operational yet.
For Oakland Council Member Taylor, who voted against shifting funds from the police, the solution requires addressing the problem from all sides, saying there’s a “balance that needs to be struck.”
“A lot of times the dialogue around public safety is around the dichotomy of police or community based organizations, the response versus prevention,” he said. “We need to have all of our tools available to us and deployed in order to help address the situation.”
To him, that means working with “trusted messengers” and communitybased “violence interrupters” to help people see “an alternate path” to violence, he said.
“It’s going to take a little bit of time, but we need to make those (social) investments now so that we see those benefits in a sustained way moving forward,” Taylor said. “The police are absolutely not the solution long term, but we do need to have responders when situations arise.”
Wintemute added that he thinks community violence prevention programs are essential.
“I think it’s a very good thing that at the state and federal level, we’re getting serious about taking on the root causes of violence,” he said. “People need jobs, and they need a decent education and a place to live, all of which combine to give people a sense of the future and investment — morally and emotionally speaking — in the country.”
To Lofstrom, the way forward comes down to identifying exactly what drove the increase.
“Unless we can identify under what circumstances these increases happened, we’re not going to find the solutions,” he said. Doing so will require closely tracking the numbers in 2021 to see if the trend continues.
While some of the complicating factors of 2020 — like shelterinplace orders and shuttered businesses — might be going away, it’s unclear whether the homicide rate will decline again.
Other crimes — aggravated assaults, violent robberies, burglaries, and thefts — are starting to return to prepandemic levels in San Francisco, a Chronicle analysis found. But with homicides, it’s still too early to tell, as the numbers are relatively small compared with other types of crime and tend to vary significantly from month to month.
But on the Fourth of July, Oakland experienced one of its most violent days this year with seven shootings and two deaths, bringing the city’s homicide total to 67 this year.
“We are losing people at an alarming rate, and we have to recognize how much trauma and hurt and pain it causes in our community,” Armstrong said at a news conference. And in Wintemute’s view, both the violence and the gun sales are showing no signs of slowing.
“People are still unemployed, people are still really angry about a history of disparity with not enough being done about it ... political violence is at a scale we’ve never seen before,” he said. “I think we’re in for a really terrible summer.”
Lofstrom added that examining crimes at a local level to figure out where and why the homicides are happening, and who the victims are, “is an important step towards better understanding what the factors are that contributed to the disturbing increase.”
“I think there’s a real sense of urgency here because we are talking about increases in the loss of lives,” Lofstrom said. “So that gives me hope that efforts to find those answers will be taken seriously, and we will hopefully have these answers soon.”