Efforts to demonize and defund law and order in America have led to an increase in crime in major cities across America, including an increase in deaths among African-Americans.
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute and author of the 2016 best-seller “The War On Cops,” has looked at police data and news reports in major cities such as Chicago and New York and written a report detailing how violent crime has risen in the wake of racial protests.
Mac Donald wrote in 2014 about what she called the Ferguson Effect, an increase in violent crime following a wave of protests after the police shooting of Michael Brown. Back then, protests also denounced police across the country as racist en masse – and media and social elites supported the narrative. In 2015 and 2016, a spike in violent crime led to an additional 2,000 black homicide victims.
Mac Donald says the trend has started much quicker following the current round of protests and riots. “In Minneapolis,” she wrote, “shootings have more than doubled this year compared to last. Nearly half of all those shootings have occurred since George Floyd’s death, according to a Minneapolis Star Tribune analysis.”
Chicago and New York City have seen some of the worst increases in violent crime, according to Mac Donald:
In Chicago, 18 people were killed and 47 wounded in drive- and walk-by shootings last weekend. The fatalities included a one-year-old boy riding in a car with his mother (the gunman drove up alongside and emptied his gun into the vehicle) and a 10-year-old girl struck in the head inside her home; a group of youth on the street outside her house had started shooting at another group of youth nearby. The previous weekend in Chicago, 104 people were shot, 15 fatally. The deceased included a three-year-old boy riding in a car with his father on Father’s Day—his gangbanger father was the intended victim—and a 13-year-old girl shot in her head in her home.
New York City’s homicide rate is at a five-year high; the number of shooting victims was up over 42 percent through June 21 compared with the same period in 2019. The number of shootings in the first three weeks of June was over twice that of the same period in 2019, making this June the city’s bloodiest in nearly a quarter century, according to the New York Times. At 4 A.M. last Sunday, a 30-year-old woman was shot in the head in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a house party. On Saturday afternoon, a man and a woman were shot to death outside a Brooklyn home. Early Friday morning, a 19-year-old girl was shot to death in the heart of Manhattan, near Madison Square Park, on East 26th Street.
Milwaukee, Mac Donald reported, has seen homicide increase by 132% and “more people have been killed in Baltimore than at this point in 2019, which ended with the highest homicide rate on record for that city.” Further, 78% of the homicide victims in Chicago are black, even though blacks make up less than a third of the city’s population.
Meanwhile, a handful of people in these cities have been killed by police, most of whom were shot after attacking or threatening police with guns or knives. Yet all over the country, police morale is down as protests and politicians continue to call for defunding departments, with some cities even introducing bills to do just that.
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