Coronavirus: Thread

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https://mises.org/wire/role-covid-lockdowns-2020s-homicide-surge

The Role Of COVID Lockdowns In 2020's Homicide Surge

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

Twenty twenty was an unpleasant year for so many reasons. It was a
year of riots, unemployment, and the trend in overall rising mortality
continued unabated.

Homicides also increased.

In fact, in preliminary homicide data, it looks like homicides
increased a lot in 2020.

According to the FBI’s Preliminary Uniform Crime Report for the first
half of 2020, “murder and nonnegligent manslaughter offenses increased
14.8%, and aggravated assault offenses were up 4.6%.”

If the second half of 2020 proves to be about the same as the first
half, then the nationwide homicide rate for 2020 will have risen from
5 per 100,000 in 2019 to 5.8 per 100,000 in 2020. That’s a big
increase, and puts 2020’s total at the highest rate recorded in
fifteen years, matching 2006’s rate of 5.8 per 100,000.

Some other data, however, suggests the year-end numbers for 2020 will
be even worse than that. Homicides look to be up more than 20 percent
during the fall of 2020 compared to the previous year. Thus, the
increase from 2019 to 2020 may prove to be one of the largest
increases in homicide in more than fifty years.

Source: FBI, "Crime in the US" report, 2020 preliminary report.

Meanwhile, homicides in certain cities increased by far worse rates.
Year-over-year increases of 30 percent or more were common in 2020,
and this wasn’t limited to only large cities.

In data posted by researcher Jeff Asher, total year-over-year
homicides through September 2020 were up in a wide range of locations:
up 55 percent in Chicago, up 54 percent in Boston, up 38 percent in
Denver, and up 105 percent in Omaha.
What Caused the Surge?

It’s much easier to count homicides than to determine the events and
phenomena driving trends in homicides. It’s never a good idea to
attribute changes in homicide totals to any single cause.

Nonetheless, we can hazard some guesses.

If we’re going to ask ourselves what might have caused such an
unusually large rise in homicide, we ought to look for unusual events.

Most obvious among these, of course, are the stay-at-home orders,
business closures, and lockdowns that have occurred since March of
last year. These are pretty unusual things.

Although it is considered somewhat heretical to point out that
lockdowns can produce significant negative societal side effects, the
connection to violent behavior is so undeniable that this is now
openly admitted.

For example, in a recent interview with The Atlantic, sociologist
Patrick Sharkey discusses some of the likely causes of 2020’s surge in
violence, stating:

    Last year, everyday patterns of life broke down. Schools shut
down. Young people were on their own. There was a widespread sense of
a crisis and a surge in gun ownership. People stopped making their way
to institutions that they know and where they spend their time. That
type of destabilization is what creates the conditions for violence to
emerge.

When asked if “idle time” caused by lockdowns was somehow connected to
rising homicides, Sharkey continued:

    It’s not just idle time but disconnection. That might be the
better way to talk about it. People lost connections to institutions
of community life, which include school, summer jobs programs, pools,
and libraries. Those are the institutions that create connections
between members of communities, especially for young people. When
individuals are not connected to those institutions, then they’re out
in public spaces, often without adults present. And while that dynamic
doesn’t always lead to a rise in violence, it can.

The connection between a lack of community institutions and social
dysfunction is well known by sociologists.

Last year, when looking at the role the stay-at-home orders might have
had on the summer’s riots, I wrote:

    As much as lockdown advocates may wish that human beings could be
reduced to creatures that do nothing more than work all day and watch
television all night, the fact is that no society can long endure such
conditions.

    Human beings need what are known as "third places." …

As described by a Brookings Institution report, these third places
include churches, parks, recreation centers, hairdressers' shops,
gyms, and even fast-food restaurants.

Yet, the lockdown advocates, in a matter of a few days, cut people off
from their third places and insisted, in many cases, that this would
be the "new normal" for a year or more.

These third places cannot simply be shut down—and the public told to
just forget about them indefinitely—without creating the potential for
violence and other antisocial behavior.

Few of these places exist for the explicit purpose of reducing
violence, although they tend to have this effect. But during the
government-mandated lockdowns, some organizations specifically devoted
to violence prevention were shut down and, as noted by law professor
Tracey Meares, the pandemic has prevented many antiviolence programs
from operating. These programs, however, require "a great deal of a
face-to-face contact, typically, among service providers and the folks
who are most likely to both commit these offenses and be the victims
of them," Meares says. "And it's a lot harder to do that when people
can't meet in person."

Of course, it’s not that these people just can’t meet in person, as if
it were physically impossible to do so. It’s that in many places they
are legally prohibited from doing so. This means even the most urgent
cases were neglected and put on the back burner because policymakers
made a decision to ignore the realities of violent crime in order to
obsess over covid risks.

And this is a point that must be made repeatedly. “The pandemic” isn’t
what caused the widespread destruction of social institutions that are
key in increasing social cohesion and preventing violence. Government
edicts did this. Certainly, given fears over covid infection, it
stands to reason that many people would have elected to stay home, and
that important social institutions would have functioned at reduced
capacity even without government mandates.

However, what government mandates did was prevent people from even
using their own discretion, which means even the most at-risk,
isolated, and emotionally volatile people—the people who need these
institutions the most—were cut off from important resources.

Also important in understanding homicides is the fact covid lockdowns
have increased domestic violence; as Sharkey notes, “Intimate-partner
violence increased in 2020.” Again, advocates for stay-at-home orders
have used their bizarrely extreme preoccupation with covid deaths as
an excuse to insist it is "worth it" to keep women and children locked
up with their abusers. Homicides have increased as a result in many
cases.
The Role of Police in Lockdown Enforcement

The lockdowns aren’t the only factors behind rising crime, of course.
Another factor in the rising homicide rate is likely the decline of
the public’s trust in police institutions.

The reputations of police and police organizations appear to have gone
into significant decline in recent years as police encounters are
increasingly being recorded and made public—thus exposing police abuse
and what at least appears to be police abuse.

These events have been connected to rising rates of violent crime. As
noted by both Sharkey and by crime historian Randolph Roth, the
public’s trust in government institutions—which certainly includes
police—can impact a community’s willingness to turn to violence in
personal interactions.

In other words, antipolice sentiment is regarded as a likely indirect
cause of growing homicide rates. This declining trust manifested
itself in last summer’s riots, but the origins of the riots predate
both the riots and the George Floyd case.

But even when we look to the role of police agencies’ status within
communities, we find that the stay-at-home orders and lockdowns again
play a role.

It is the police, after all, who have been responsible for enforcing
government orders to wear masks, close businesses, and avoid
gatherings. Throughout 2020, police have been a central in harassing
churchgoers, beating up nonviolent citizens for not “social
distancing,” and arresting women for not wearing masks. Police have
also arrested business owners and shut down their businesses. And then
there was the case of a six-year-old girl who was taken from her
mother because the mother wasn’t wearing a mask when she dropped her
daughter off at school. Who will be providing the regime’s muscle when
it comes to separating this child from her mother? Naturally, it will
be the police.

Although the police have continued to enjoy uncritical support from
the “Back the Blue” movement, more reasonable people can only tolerate
so much when it comes to police who willingly attack and arrest people
for the noncrimes of using their own private property or not wearing a
mask on a public sidewalk.
Reversing the Damage Done in 2020

It’s unclear at this point if reversing policies that caused a year of
community destruction can quickly undo the damage. In any case,
however, the responsible thing to do is end any and all policies that
keep churches, community centers, and meeting spaces closed. The
police must be out of the business of roughing people up in the name
of social distancing. The politicians’ obsession with isolating people
must end.